Sunday, August 04, 2013

Does a Good Man Wake Up Younger Every Day? Angel Santiesteban Who is Celebrating His Birthday Today In Prison

Does a Good Man Wake Up Younger Every Day? Angel Santiesteban Who is
Celebrating His Birthday Today In Prison
Posted on August 3, 2013

Dear Angel,

Today is August 2nd and it's your birthday, locked up in this filthy and
inhumane Concentration Camp of the dictatorship that is Prison 1580.
They try to freeze you, isolate you, silence you. Nothing has succeeded.
Not only because you are stronger morally than that tremendous State
apparatus put to work to control a man whose only weapons are your
words, your truths shouted to the whole world, because, with even more
ice with which they try to cover your heart, it is your heart that melts
the ice. The more they crush you stronger you get. The more they try to
silence you, them more your voice resonates internationally. They should
have taken note of it, but we already know: the dictatorships are always
like this, obsessed and stupid.

Angel, on Sunday, 28 July, you'd served five months of unjust
imprisonment, and still, you maintain intact your joy, your optimism,
your enthusiasm for writing, your desire to love and share the beautiful
things of life in freedom, with everyone you love and with your people,
for this you have sacrificed your life. But, and this is exactly what
most bothers your jailers, who know well because they live with you, for
you there is no sacrifice in it: you feel and live as if it is a
privilege, you know a chosen one, it is a pride for you to be able to
fulfill the mission of denouncing — now from the bowels of the Castro
hell — the horrors of a criminal totalitarian system that subjected its
own people and helped other dictatorships to subject theirs, lying to
the world with a mask of false humanism that they have just dropped,
again, now when they've been caught hiding arms in sugar that the Cuban
people haven't had for decades; sugar with which to sweeten their bitter
existence.

Angel, we know that we know that you are still losing weight, you're
extremely pale, receive visits once a month, have a scant three minutes
of phone time a week, you are regularly in solitary confinement, you
live harassed by guards and prisoner stool pigeons… but you still do the
cleverest things to send us your denunciations and those beautiful
letters that you write to your loved ones, and with which you give us
peace in exchange for our anguish, knowing that you are constantly being
stalked and are in danger. You're always thinking of others before yourself.

Angel, don't forget for even a second: today, on your birthday, we are
with you and love you more than ever.

Your family and friends

2 August 2013

Source: "Does a Good Man Wake Up Younger Every Day? Angel Santiesteban
Who is Celebrating His Birthday Today In Prison | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/does-a-good-man-wake-up-younger-every-day-angel-santiesteban-who-is-celebrating-his-birthday-today-in-prison/

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