“Leonardo Padura, as in the past, has been indifferent to the injustices the Communist authorities are committing towards me.”
The author Ángel Santiesteban told Marti Noticias that faced with his prison sentence without evidence at trial, his ex-colleagues in the Cuban Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC) have known to maintain a complicit silence so that, he said, they will preserve their little privileges such as trips abroad.
He added that his wife, the actress Sheila Roche, went to members and directors of UNEAC, Miguel Barnet and Alex Pausides, and that they assured her that nothing would happen but, when he was convicted and sentences, they responded to her questions with silence.
Meanwhile,Santiesteban said that Leonardo Padura , as in the past, has been indifferent to injustices being committed by the Communist authorities and that, despite the fact that some news agencies present him as a dissident, the writer of detective novels “plays with the chain, but never with the monkey,” as the common expression goes in Cuba.
However, Santiesteban recognizes that Leopoldo Luis, a former member of the Bearded Cayman cultural publication, asked on Twitter for the writers of the island to protest the court case that had been fabricated and said that no author deserved to be sentenced for his writing.
The Superior Court upheld the Cuba regime’s sentence of 5 years against the award-winning writer Ángel Santiesteban, who was accused of housebreaking and injury. The author, who was awarded the Casa de las Americas prize, among other awards, regretted the decision and said that he is an innocent man.
Santiesteban said that at the trial they did not present any evidence against him, and that one of the supposed proofs rests on the declaration of a lieutenant colonel in the regime who argued that his handwriting indicated his guilt.
Meaning, more than anything, the official said that the author is guilty of his own writing. The Cuban writer added that his problems with the law in Cuba began when he decided to write freely in his blog, The Children Nobody Wanted.
Angel Santiesteban, waiting to be sent to prison to serve his sentence, said his only regret is not having taken off the mask, which he was forced to wear to live under the regime in Cuba, much earlier.
From Martí Noticias
February 1 2013
