Pre-criminal dangerousness

Photo taken from hhh.

Among those every day who are taken in for dangerousness in Cuba, today it has fallen on Pánfilo. He will be behind bars for two years for having yelled that he was hungry in front of a camera, because this is what the government considers dangerous. I remember very well the words of Gorki’s lawyer on the day before the trial in July of last year: to convict you they don’t need proof, a declaration from the police is enough, no one escapes. In passing he told us that the charges that really suit the repressive machinery just fine is that now they don’t even have to abide by the legislative paperwork to imprison someone.

The trial made me want to cry, I saw the head of the sector and one of his subordinates lie. The tongue of state security was putting words in the mouths of the two police officers whose hands trembled as they made their declarations. Then Heidi came, the zone president of the CDR for Playa and an art history professor at the Instituto Superior de Artes. With her there was no mistaking it: not one word she said was true, the worst is that she liked out of conviction and that is, without any doubt, the saddest thing you can see from the public bench.

It’s repulsive to imagine what to level of arbitrariness this government can reach through its channels to crush the people and strip them of everything, even their own ideas. If I had not seen it with my own eyes I might never have understood it.