14ymedio, Havana, 26 December 2021 – The singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez recognized this year, for the first time, that Cuba “could be” a dictatorship. He did not do so on his blog, Segunda Cita – where he makes room for different but monotonous voices, all pro-government – but in a Chilean magazine, Culto, in an interview that was later reproduced by the official media Cubadebate.
In it, he also said that there are “orthodox sectors of the Cuban Government that have obstructed changes,” although he released the designated president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, from being a part of this, saying he understands the “need to break a certain inertia” and that is why he approved certain laws.
At the same time, and in a regular speech, he pointed to the United States as the origin of the island’s ills: “They have been suffocating Cuba for more than 60 years, attacking it, slandering it, and when it defends itself, it is a dictatorship. It may be so. That they have forced it to be so to some extent. Who forced it? The greatest dictatorship on the planet: that of selfishness, that of money, that which does not believe in love but in usury.”
“Down with the blockade,” Rodríguez declared twice in the massive concert that he gave at the beginning of October in Madrid, at which fifty Cuban exiles demonstrated in the capital of Spain.
After the July 11 protests in Cuba, the singer-songwriter accepted requested to talk from Yunior García Aguilera, from which he left with the promise to intercede for “the prisoners who were not violent.” The playwright even spoke of a future joint “project” that would be made public “in due course” and that “could serve as the beginning of a truly plural, inclusive, civic, respectful and broad debate.”
For a moment, it seemed that Silvio Rodríguez would follow the path of other formerly pro-government colleagues, such as Pablo Milanés, Leo Brouwer or Chucho Valdés , and would say enough to the repression exerted by the regime against those who seek change on the island. But For now, there are no signs of it.
On December 16, he was awarded the National Community Culture Award, which Rodríguez received at the headquarters of the “sociocultural project” Cabildo Cuasicuaba, in Los Sitio, Centro Habana. Very close to there, that same day, with his back to the usual official acts of complacency and propaganda, a passerby died when the wall of a house in ruins fell on him.
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