On the day of the death of the Cuban singer Pablo Milanés, the dictator of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, left a message of condolence on Twitter. The text is cold. Díaz-Canel speaks of “physical disappearance” and of an “inseparable voice of our generation”. The reason for the protocol tone is simple. Milanés, who for decades was a supporter of the island’s dictatorial regime, acting as an instrument of soft power through his music (some of them sensational), for at least ten years was a harsh critic of the regime.
Last year, when the agents of repression used the club and arrested demonstrators in the streets of Cuba, Milanés went to social networks and left his message. He left his solidarity with those who were beaten in the streets for asking for freedom. Almost nobody paid attention to him.
Ten years earlier, in 2011, Milanés had already definitively marked its break with the dictatorship. In an open letter, he criticized the physical attacks on women of the Ladies in White Movement – which defends human rights and calls for the release of political prisoners in Cuba –, the censorship of the press and the silence of his country’s intellectuals in the face of the totalitarian monster. which the regime became.
Milanés took a long time to see what shone brighter than the sun. A lot, but he noticed and expressed his dismay. Almost nobody paid attention to him.
Criticized by artists who still continue to fawn over the Cuban dictatorship, Milanés hardened without losing tenderness: “My 53 years of militancy revolutionary grant me the right, which very few exercise in Cuba, to demonstrate with freedom, the same freedom required by my principles, without any compromise (…) with the Cuban leaders, whom I admired and respected; but, they are not gods, nor am I a fanatic, and when I feel that I can make a rebuke and say no, I say it without fear and without reservations”.
Milanés died in Madrid and was buried by there. This is not just a detail. He had lived in Spain for years, having been transformed into a kind of “exile”. Even though he was a man of the hard left, he was canceled for not having accepted to behave like a dog anymore.
Díaz-Canel went to protocol with the death of Milanés, but his pack did the job of hijacking Milanés’ biography and repositioning it in his favor. Like grave robbers, Bolivarian leaders and their xerimbabos acted quickly. Former president of Bolivia and coca grower Evo Morales and Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro joined the revolutionary howl. Behind them came the usual followers. The Brazilians Randolfe Rodrigues and Guilherme Boulos, the Chavista Ernesto Villegas and the former leader of the FARC Rodrigo Lodoño.
The sycophants of the Cuban dictatorship who think and make it seem that Milanés were still like them.
Milanés was not the first and will not be the last artist to experience the purge for criticizing the “revolution”. In Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, the priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal, one of the symbols of Sandinismo, has become a pariah. At his wake, his coffin was almost violated by angry protesters. The Argentinean Mercedes Sosa faced the accusation of being a Zionist in life, as if her refusal not to boycott Israel and her sympathy for the country were a gesture of betrayal of the revolution.
For those who don’t links the name to the person, Mercedes was possibly the artist who most embodied the role of being the voice of Latin American unity and expressed elements of the culture and aspirations for democracy and freedom in the region – although the concepts of “democracy” and “freedom” ” have been kidnapped by the left, which treated them as something that would not be possible to achieve without revolution and socialism.
Milanés died far from their land. He died mocked by many traveling companions. He died without seeing his free Cuba. Apparently, they will desecrate his legacy and choices, turning him into yet another museum piece. From the museum of dictatorships.
