In Cuba the Regime Decides Who Can, and Can't, Go Home Again

In Cuba the Regime Decides Who Can, and Can't, Go Home Again
Posted: 04/01/2015 2:24 pm
Yoani Sanchez Award-winning Cuban blogger

Generation Y, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 1 April 2015 -- Imagine that, after
a flight of more than nine hours, you arrive at your destination but
they don't let you get off the plane. Your legs are numb from the
journey, your relatives are waiting for you out there, and your
suitcases are full of gifts for friends, but an immigration official
informs you that you will not be allowed to enter the country of your
birth. You have to stay in your seat, tired and frustrated, while they
clean the plane for the next passengers. In the time you wait for it to
return to the airport whence you came, you can't stop asking yourself,
"How could this happen to me in my own country?"

That nightmare was just experienced by the artist Aldo "Maldito"
Menendez -- whose nickname means "cursed" -- as he tried to visit Cuba
to participate in the Cervantes Alternate Lives Festival of Camagüey
(FIVAC). The Cuban consulate in Spain had already warned him that he was
not welcome on the island and had even stamped his passport with an
authoritarian "annulled" on the so-called "empowerment" that Cuban
emigrants need to enter their own country. But the truly maldito was not
satisfied and wanted to experience firsthand whether they really
wouldn't let him cross the border.

Like any artist, Maldito is daring and irreverent. His works are
provocative, and even the title of his blog, Castor Jaboa, is an anagram
that, when we reorder its letters, delivers its message loud and clear.*
However, beyond his art, this young man, who studied at the San
Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, is a real cubanazo
who boasts the talent, mischievousness and humor that so characterize
us.** So how is it possible that, for political reasons, he is prevented
from being in the place where he's from, the site from which flows much
of his art and his world of reference?

Maldito's is not a new story, but that is no reason that we should get
used to such abuse and cease to denounce it. After more than two years
of immigration reform, its implementation has not eliminated the
blackmail that Cuban emigrants are subjected to in order to enter the
island. The punishment of those who criticize the Cuban government from
their residence abroad remains a denial of their right to return.

A few, protected by their power, decide who can once again walk these
streets, embrace their friends, be in the house where they spent their
childhood. And they do it from the arrogance of believing that they,
with their ideology and their military uniforms, represent the essence
of Cuba, when in realty they only manage to deform it, to restrict it,
to kill it.

*"Castor Jaboa" is an anagram for "Abajo Castro" ("Down With Castro").

**A cubanazo is a boisterous, shamelessly stereotypical Cuban man (a
woman would be a cubanaza) who dresses, walks, speaks and thinks in
uniquely Cuban ways.

Source: In Cuba the Regime Decides Who Can, and Can't, Go Home Again |
Yoani Sanchez -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/in-cuba-the-regime-decide_b_6986992.html