Blockade

Second Date

Blockade

By Silvio Rodriguez

From Cubadebate

I’ve been in the city since Saturday because of an emergency. The video card in our computer died, halting the recording of “Ojalá.”

Those cards are not sold here. Woe to any company that sells them. Million-dollar fines imposed against them. Of course, we can’t order them from Cuba. That’s our defect: we live where we shouldn’t. Because we live where we were born, we are bad, we are accomplices and, to boot, we’re boobs. The stupidity of living in our own homeland makes it hard for us to create music schools and recording studios. Even harder to maintain them.

What fool even attempts to improve the part of the professional panorama of which he’s a part? What he has to do is leave. If he leaves illegally, so much the better. To some, the only way to legitimize a project is to disqualify everything that has occurred in Cuba in the past half-a-century.

They punish us because they like us a lot. They suffer as they see us suffering on this accursed island. That’s why they tighten our screws. So we can learn to be better Cubans on the outside. And they take measures to isolate those of us who are islanders. Why do they take them? Because they are the wealthiest, the prettiest, the happiest. Why against us? Because they consider us to be quite the opposite. Who applauds? Those who sigh, wishing they could be like them.

Luckily, there are always some who manage to escape from that “free world.” Bless them.

We are a country that devoted itself to teaching people how to read, to building universities for doctors and artists. And now they want to make believe that we like to have pianos without strings and wind without sneakers.

Some imagination.

A Cuban musician and poet, Silvio Rodríguez is the founder of the Nueva Trova Movement.