A gaunt young man walks barefoot with his guitar over his shoulder and poems in hand, with three or four friends, outside the ISA (Institute of the Arts) … and the Cuban dictatorship panics. He barely made it a block past the school entrance when a patrol car and several belligerent young men approached us to arrest Abel Lescay, the young man with the guitar. The last time he had been taken away, on July 12, he was dragged by his hair, naked, from his house and locked in a jail, where he was slapped around a bit to get him to stop protesting. "They're taking me away. They're going to beat me," Abel shouted as one policeman threw his guitar to the ground and another forced him into the patrol car.
In the morning the musician had publicly announced that he was going to give a concert at 4:00 pm at the ISA, where he studies. By the afternoon we already knew that the concert had been censored because he was told: "You're a student indicted for the events of July 11 who, in addition, demonstrates against the Revolution."
"We'll do it on the beach. See you at the ISA entrance at 4:30," the musician wrote on his Facebook page, inviting his friends. At 4:15 there was already a patrol car with three policemen and their corresponding thugs shooing away anyone who tried to get close. Some who came, in fact, were scared off.
Abel Lescay slipped out through a back exit and reached the main entrance of the ISA while another gang of minions, teachers and directors looked for him inside the school to stop him. He passed in front of the patrol car and we followed him. There were only a few of us. Others lagged behind us in the distance. He handed the policeman who arrested him some verses that he left along the way: "You escape/you lay an egg in the sand and drown in the sea/Your baby is born at last/and drowns in the sea."
Given the lack of control shown by the political police, they may try him again, just for that. Lately they are not only hounding people as if there were no tomorrow, but they are also making fools of themselves, as illustrated in this case, or when they broke up a party of a Facebook memes group whose members had only planned to meet each other in person. Perhaps they know the end is near and these are desperate throes of decisive decline.
The propaganda's lies
The night before the arrest, a few minutes were dedicated to Abel Lescay's case on the worst official propaganda broadcast on Cuban television: a program called Con filo whose sole purpose is to twist the facts and warp the souls of those viewers still willing to believe.
Seeking to sully the ethereal image of a poet that corresponds to most of Abel Lescay's existence, they showed a video in which he appears insulting the Police with censored words (I don't know why they insisted that the video was posted by a friend, when we all know that it was shot by the Police themselves, and brought to light by "El Guerrero Cubano," the youtuber supplied by State Security...).
The attempt to tarnish Lescay's image, portraying him as a criminal, was the subtlest moment of the broadcast. The crudest and plainly fallacious part came when they quoted the Facebook post by Abel after his trial on January 26th, on which he wrote that, in his view, "no serious crime was proved other than me offending a policeman, a few stones thrown at the pharmacy, and the waving of some small flags."
He was referring to his transgression (offending a policeman), the case of three 20-year-olds who threw rocks at a pharmacy, and that of a gay man who is being charged for simply carrying a Cuban flag. He cited all that together because it was a collective trial. The political police, who write the script for Con filo, know that perfectly well, but propaganda’s goal is not to inform or to prove, but rather to confuse; thus, the pathetic presenter, Michel Torres Corona, attributed all these misdeeds to the ISA student: "Note that this good citizen does not believe that he has been shown to be guilty of a serious crime, except for an offense against a policeman, and some stones thrown at a pharmacy," he said with elementary sarcasm before proceeding to mock the boy's studies, as if study piano, solfeggio and theory since the age of seven were nothing at all.
Abel remained at the Siboney station for four or five hours while his friends searched for him elsewhere, thrown off his track by the police. This time he was released. On February 24 (chance creates art) they will inform him of the spurious court's decision. The prosecutor's office has asked, for the minor offense he committed, for seven years in prison, a fact that they were very careful to omit on Con filo.