Raul Castro

Fighting for Freedom of Music in Cuba

by Ivan Osorio on February 1, 2010 · 1 comment

in Culture, International, Personal Liberty

At Freemuse.org, Kristina Funkeson reviews the documentary film Cuba Rebelion!, which chronicles the underground music scene that has been thriving in Cuba in recent years, despite the government’s disapproval.

To get accepted by the state owned musical companies the groups need approval by the Cultural Ministry. One of the refused groups isQva Libre. Despite being one of the most ambitious and popular groups they are not signed at any record label.

Since the music played on Cuban radio stations mostly consists of traditional music, such as salsa, the alternative music scene is spread through word of mouth. The musicians witness about how music videos often are censored and that there is nothing to do about it.

“I’m fed up with it”, says Gorki Luis Águila Carrasco from Porno Para Ricardo in the film. He has spent more than four months in a maximum security prison without a trial. According to him, people are put into prison only “for making art which is not politically correct”. He will never forget the terrible conditions and how he suffered in jail.

Despite the persecution, Gorki has consistently refused to tone down his criticism of the Castro regime. As he noted in a reason.tv interview last year, police came into his band’s rehearsal space and arrested him for “pre-criminal behavior.” Luckily, his case got substantial international attention, which put pressure on the regime. That helped get him released, something that Gorki described as unprecedented. The video of the full interview is below (disclosure: I translated for the subtitles).

The Goldwater Century

by Ivan Osorio on January 2, 2009

in Culture

When Barry Goldwater and Frank Sinatra both passed away in 1998, it felt to me like the 20th century was truly coming to an end. Wish we had them around now.

Yesterday, Fidel and Raul Castro marked half a century in power — so two generations of Cuban adults on the island have known no government but dictatorship at the hands of one Castro or the other.

This is naturally offensive to anyone who values freedom and democracy in any meaningful sense, so, a good antidote to the Castro brothers’ celebration of tyranny is the centennial of Barry Goldwater’s birth. Blogger  Todd Seavey notes on Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run:

That year the Republican platform was so explicitly pro-free enterprise and anti-big government you’d think Ayn Rand wrote most of it. Goldwater lost bigtime to the architect of much of our subsequent big-government despair — Lyndon Johnson — but inspired a generation of later activists, to whom much of the credit goes for whatever success America’s had in avoiding European-style social democracy, at least until roughly now.

The story of Goldwater’s trailblazing candidacy making Reagan’s election in 1980 and the Republican takeover on Congress in 1994 possible has been told many times, but no matter. His influence on the politics of the century his life spanned — like that of Sinatra on its culture — will always be worth celebrating.