Category: El Sexto – Danilo Maldonado Machado

His art is street art. He never went to an academy. As a child he tried but was rejected for being “very small”

“In those years I was selling milk caramels in the neighborhood to help my mother get by,” he recalls.

“Sometimes we did not even have fifty cents to buy milk. The rebellion against poverty and oppression began at that time.”

His art is street art. He never went to an academy. As a child he tried but was rejected for being “very small.” Leonel, a teacher in the House of Culture in his neighborhood, took him under his wing and showed him the first strokes.

“From there I wanted to get out what I had inside, but I did not know how,” he says.

The first time that Maldonado went to prison was due to a robbery at a warehouse on a Cuban Army tank base. At that time he was serving his compulsory military service. He was sentenced to six years in prison. The prison experience changed him “forever.”

“Prison is a place where you find many types of people, with different cultures and points of view. Learning to live among them, to live together, is one of the great lessons that experience left me with,” he says.

His artistic name, El Sexto (The Sixth) occurred to him in the midst of the Cuban government’s campaign to bring back “The Cuban Five” – spies imprisoned in the U.S.

In prison he also learned that respect is not gained through violence but “with principles and with acting in the right way of.”

Maldonado does not hide that he had a troubled past.

“I have been involved in many things in my life that have made me what I am. I do not come from a monastery. I come from the street but that is not where I wanted to stay,” he answers when asked about the campaign against him pushed by bloggers working for the Cuban government who accuse him of being addicted to drugs.

“People change, they have the right to do it. I do not like even the smell of drinking,” adds the artist.

His artistic name, El Sexto (the Sixth), came in the midst of the campaign by the Cuban government to bring back the five Wasp Network spies imprisoned in the United States, who were known in Cuba as “The Five Heroes.”

He called himself “The Sixth Hero,” who represented the voice of the Cuban people, “the hostage” of the dictatorship, according to Maldonado.

Maldonado has been arrested three times for political reasons

“They (the Government) put them on television, like they are part of your family. I want people to know the message of freedom and to open their eyes. So I understood I had to come to them with a message that was sarcastic and that everyone could understand,” he says.

“You cross out my things, I cross out yours,” he wrote, about the stupid black spots that officialdom uses to try to hide graffit in the capital. In addition, he distributed leaflets with subservise phrases and invited the whole world to be free and happy.

“I am doing my work: being free. I would like others to see that it is possible to be free and to break with the government,” he says when asked about his role in Cuban culture.

Maldonado has been arrested three times for political reasons. In 2014 he attempted to stage a street performance titled Animal Farm. He proposed to release two pigs in Havana’s Central Park. On the backs of piglets, which were painted green, the names of the Cuban rulers were also painted: Fidel on one piglet and Raúl on the other.

The idea was that whoever captured the piglets could keep them as a prize. It was easy to imagine what the winners would do with them. The daring act, which never came to fruition, cost him ten months’ imprisonment in the Valle Grande prison.

El Sexto has been imprisoned for joining the Ladies in White in their Sunday protest marches to demand the release of political prisoners

The conditions in the Cuban prisons, the dirt, the bad food and the degrading treatment to the inmates were documented by him in a diary. In addition, the artist was able to take photographs that he clandestinely sneaked out of Valle Grande to support his complaints.

Art and his activism go hand in hand. Sometimes both activities are scandalous.

“There are people who accuse me of calling the flag a ‘rag’ or reproach me for a work of art made with the bust of José Martí. For me what is truly sacred is human life, above any other symbol created by society. I believe in life and in respect for it,” says Maldonado.

El Sexto has been imprisoned for joining the Ladies in White in their Sunday protest marches to demand the release of political prisoners, and has been part of the ‘We All March’ campaign.

Laura Pollán, the deceased leader of the Ladies in White and Oswaldo Payá, the deceased leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, are tattooed on his skin, along with a petition for the release of Leopoldo López, a Venezuelan politician currently a political prisoner in that country.

In 2015, Danilo Maldonado received the Vaclav Havel Prize, for “creative dissent, the display of courage and creativity to challenge injustice and live in truth”

“I am worried about the situation of political prisoners in Cuba, Eduardo Cardet and many others,” he says. He is also trying to sensitize the international community to the drama of thousands of Cubans who were stranded in Latin America following Barack Obama’s repeal of the wet foot/dry foot policy, shortly before he left office.

“These are our brothers, we should unite to help them. As long as we Cubans do not join together, we will not change the situation of our country,” he laments.

In 2015, Danilo Maldonado received the Vaclav Havel Prize, awarded to people “who participate in creative dissent, display courage and creativity to challenge injustice and live in truth.”

Currently, El Sexto is preparing an art exhibition in the United States. He also plans to travel to Geneva to talk about human rights in Cuba and plans to attend the Oslo Freedom Forum.

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This article is part of an agreement between 14ymedio and the Nuevo Herald.

El Sexto, the artistic alias of Maldonado, left and reappeared a while later at the side of the Habana Libre Hotel. With a mobile phone, he broadcast live on Faceboo, speaking directly to the screen and mocking Fidel and Raul Castro, recalling dead regime opponents, moving through the desolate streets: “Nobody it outside,” he said. “Rare,” he scoffed. “Nobody wants to talk. But how long will you not want to talk, gentlemen?”

He was an eccentric doing a comic-political show in an empty but guarded theater. The most risky sitcom of the year in Havana

He wore a white Panama hat. Sunglasses hanging from his shirt. Under the right eyelid, tattooed barbed wire. Headphones around his neck. He was an eccentric putting on a comedian-politician show in an empty but guarded theater. The most risky sitcom of the year in Havana. Then he asked some squire, “Papi, where’s my can?”

El Sexto took out a spray can and on a side wall of the Habana Libre, the former Havana Hilton and the hotel where the father of the Cuban revolution had immediately taken possession of to set up his first headquarters after conquering the capital, he scrawled: “He left.”

Live. His face in the picture. Risk level one hundred.

He enjoyed it. He looked at the camera and said, “I see panic in their faces.” Six feet five-and-a-half inches tall, thin, bearded, exultant. A Don Quixote crossing the line.

Hours later, according to the reconstruction of his mother, he was forcibly removed from his apartment by a group of police and locked up in the maximum security prison Combinado del Este, outside Havana, accused of damage to state property. Only this Saturday, two months later, was he released.

“They gave me my identity card and said I would have no problem traveling outside the country,” the artist told 14ymedio a few hours after he was released without charges. “I am in good health and I am very grateful for the solidarity of all those who were aware of my situation.”

During the time he was imprisoned, Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience. A campaign on Change.org collected about 14,000 signatures for his release. Kimberley Motley, an African American lawyer specializing in human rights, traveled to Cuba in December to try to visit him in prison, but was detained and returned to the United States. The vice-president of the German Parliament, the Social Democrat Ulla Schmidt, declared herself his “political godmother.”

This was his second time in prison. In 2015 he spent 10 months locked up for planning a performance art piece with two pigs painted with the names of Fidel and Raul. In his 33 years El Sexto has become a heterodox figure of dissent. More a provocateur than an activist, he is essentially a natural punk, a creative thug who in another country would only have paid a fine for painting a wall, but to whom 21st century Cuba dedicates the punitive treatment it considers appropriate to a threat to the security of the State.

When they released him in 2015, after a hunger strike, El Sexto traveled through different countries and explained in a talk that in the beginning he defined his political stance as that of an artist in response to the official propaganda so abundant on the island: “If they have the right to violate my visual space, I also have the right to violate their visual space,” he maintained.

Years earlier Cuban government proclamations were calling for the return of five Cubans imprisoned in the United States for espionage. They were called The Five Heroes. It was then that Maldonado adopted his nickname “El Sexto” – the Sixth – and emerged as a graffit artist.

“Danilo says that art has to be brave and try to impact people,” explains his girlfriend, Alexandra Martinez, a Cuban-American journalist he met in Miami. She says that El Sexto is a fan of Estopa, a Spanish rock/rumba duo, and Joan Manuel Serrat, a Spanish singer-songwriter. She tells how impressed he was when he went to New York and visited the studio of artist Julian Schnabel, director of Before Night Falls, the film about Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban poet who died of AIDS in exile, and also the director of Basquiat, about the artist who began is career using the tag SAMO (for Same Old), on his graffiti in the streets of Manhattan.

Mrs. Machado says that in the case file the cost of erasing her child’s graffiti at Havana Libre was recorded as 27 Cuban pesos

Martinez likes a drawing he has done in his current prison stay, titled Cemetery of living men. It’s a three-level bunk with a man in the bottom, the middle bunk empty and a cockroach in the upper bunk. “Someone,” his mother says, has been sneaking out of prison the pages he painted and publishing them on his Facebook page. They have a surreal style.

He also writes. He talks about his nightmares – zoomorphic guards who mistreat him; he takes notes of the language of the prisoners – “fucking: synonymous with food”; and directs messages to his audience – “I still have not received news of my case,” “I draw little because of my allergy, the excessive dampness and the lack of light, “ “the boss of my unit beat me,” “only the cosmic knows the true purpose of this ordeal.”

Mrs. Machado says that in the case file the cost of erasing her child’s graffiti at Havana Libre was recorded as 27 Cuban pesos, the equivalent of one dollar and one cent US. “But they do not forgive what he painted,” she says. Maldonado has written from prison: “Imagine how many people laugh about me. I’m already famous in jails and prisons.” Fidel Castro left. The bars remain.

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Editor’s note:  This text is reproduced here with the permission of El País, which published it today.

El Sexto said that tomorrow he will try to leave the country and that they gave him “a telephone number in case he had problems in immigration,” he said.

Initially the investigators who took their case told the family that the graffiti artist would be accused of damaging state property, an offense “that is not included in the Penal Code,” according to a post published on Cubalex’s online site. “Painting the walls or facades of a hotel is an infraction against public adornment. Inspectors of the communal system are entitled to impose fines of 100 pesos national currency in these cases,” the text explains.

In 2015, El Sexto received the Václav Havel International Award for creative dissent

El Sexto, 32, was also imprisoned for nearly 10 months at the end of 2014 when he was arrested for painting the words “Raúl” and “Fidel,” in reference to the Castro brothers, on the side of two living pigs as part of an artistic action entitled Animal Farm. The artist planned to release the animals in Havana’s Central Park, when he was intercepted.

On that occasion the artist was accused of contempt, a crime that is imputed to those who lack respect for public officials.

In 2015, El Sexto received the Václav Havel International Award for creative dissent, awarded by the Human Rights Foundation.

Speaking to 14ymedio, the international litigator explained that she knew about the case of Danilo Maldonado, known as El Sexto (The Sixth), and had documented it.

The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) wanted to denounce El Sexto’s case before the United Nations. Motley offered to travel to the island and discreetly gather information to provide advice on the matter. She met the artist at the Oslo Freedom Forum and considers him a friend.

Once in Cuba, visiting the island for the first time, Motley tried to interview Maldonado in the Combinado del Este prison, but the authorities prevented her from holding the interview.

Nor was she able to obtain new information on El Sexto’s case from the Court.

According to Motley, she was interrogated three times after being arrested by uniformed and plainclothes officers in a sprawling police deployment that included four police cars and about 15 officers. Once she was taken to the station she was interrogated first by a policeman and then by an immigration officer.

The interrogations were in English and Spanish, although she was never provided with a translator.

The questions asked the American lawyer were: “What are you doing in Cuba? Are you an artist? Do you know the artist? And the other artists?” But they never mentioned Danilo Maldonado by name and never told her why she was under arrest.

In a second episode two immigration officers went to her hotel at midnight and threatened to put her in jail if she did not leave Cuba. They told her, “Get on that plane tomorrow or go to jail,” recalls the lawyer. In addition, the questions of the previous interrogation were repeated.

She was also held at the airport, this time by immigration agents who questioned her about why she was there and searched her backpack.

Motley says she did not call a press conference, although she knew that one would be held by the activists who accompanied her to talk with Maldonado’s mother, Maria Victoria Machado.

However, the lawyer did have a meeting scheduled with a national and a foreign journalist to discuss the case.

Although she did not communicate with the US embassy in Havana, the mediation of the diplomatic headquarters was crucial to her release.  According to Javier El-Hage, International Legal Director for the Human Rights Foundation who spoke with 14ymedio, that organization alerted American officials which speeded up the matter.

The lawyer has said she will continue to support El Sexto’s cause because “the arrest of Danilo Maldonado has no legal or moral basis.”

The prosecution has not acted to date, although it is expected that El Sexto will be released on Sunday, according to his mother.

“He has refused to eat the food they give him in the station,” Machado said. On Tuesday, relatives of the artist reported that he had been severely beaten and was holding firm against what he considers an injustice.

“Mamá, I have had a lot of aché (luck/blessing) to be a Cuban artist the day that bloody tyrant died and to be able to express myself. I’ll get out of here,” Machado said her son told her, from the detention center in Guanabacoa, a township east of the Cuban capital.

“When I asked the official what my son’s sentence would be for this crime, he told me just a fine, but then he started to talk about ‘historic conditions’ the country is going through and right there I told him that for me the state property demagoguery wouldn’t work,” she explained.

According to his mother, Maldonado has been beaten on several occasions since his arrest. “He told me himself. In Guanabacoa two officers beat him up,” she explained.

Alexandra Martinez, Maldonado’s girlfriend who lives in Miami, said that El Sexto’s detention “shows the cruelty of the Castro regime that continues to violate its people.

“The regime must release Danilo immediately. His life, his health and his safety are in play and we need him,” she said.