Jad Abumrad / Chad (Radiolab host; primarily Jad Abumrad)
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
And today we have a very different kind of story than we've ever done.
It comes from a journalist and filmmaker named Luis Treas.
And an interesting thing kind of happened as we were reporting this.
Luis and one of our producers, Tim Howard, had called up this guy, Vladimir Ceballos, who is a filmmaker himself, a Cuban guy, an exile.
And the interview happened to be just a few hours after Obama had made that big announcement.
First of all, you know, I've been here in the United States for 20 years.
And I never think that I was going to see this day, you know?
Because it has been 50 years, 53 years, since the United States, you know, broke the diplomatic relationship with Cuba, and nothing happened in Cuba, you know?
Today, a collaboration with a fantastic program, Radio Ambulante.
This is a story that predates the stuff you've been hearing in the news.
In many ways, it's maybe a tiny, dark preamble to all of that stuff.
It's a story about Cuba, the power of music, and a group of Cuban kids who decide to opt out.
In this crazy way that when Luis Treas told us about it, we almost couldn't believe.
So the reason we called up Vladi is that we wanted to hear the backstory of all of this.
Tell me about what it was like for you to be a kid.
I was happy because in Cuba we didn't have any information.
We didn't have any communication with anybody outside Cuba.
And everything that we received, it was the news that the government wanted to give to us.
He remembers listening to endless Fidel Castro speeches on the radio.
I remember when I was a kid in elementary school, all the time they were teaching us that Russia...
What's the big country in the world, the big economy, and everything that we would hope is to be like them.
It was a given that he would get in line every year to get his toy.
And then every week, he and his folks would wake up, they would go to the nearest church.
The government, they didn't believe in God, you know?
That's how you showed you were a good revolutionary and Vladimir was just being a good boy.
But when he turns 14, there comes a day when a friend takes him aside and shows him a video of Led Zeppelin.
It was my first time that I hear rock and roll music.
You know, you see Robert playing, and you see Jimmy Page with those long hair, and the move that they have.
And the thing that they say, it was really different.
And because of that, you know, I was completely changed.
He's not sure why, but in that moment... I went from a good example to freaky.
So Freaky's are what Cubans call the most extreme metalheads, hard rock, punk rockers.
We start wearing dirty clothes, clothes with holes, long hair.
I remember when I was 19 years old, 20 years old, my father gave me a Russian radio, and it was a good FM.
We went to the roof of some friends, because in those roofs you can listen to the station from Florida.
Oh man, we listened to Rolling Stone, Sympathy with the Devil.
In the beginning, everything that came from there in English was good.
Because, I don't know, that kind of music gives us another door.
So Vladdy's walking around with ripped jeans, long hair, and that's fine.
Suddenly, music you listen to became very ideological, and if you listen to rock, you were listening to the enemy of the Cuban state, the United States.
The government created a police presence in every neighborhood, every five blocks.
And Vladimir says, if the police found you and you had long hair... They'd beat us.
Send you away to work cutting sugar cane in the cane fields.
In school, they'd often cut your hair against your will.
And just to jump in, this is the point in the story where things take a very, no other way to say it, a very punk rock turn.
Because into this cultural war... Steps a guy named... Papo.
I really want to say that he tried to embody that.
That kind of bullet to your brain, that wake up...
He went several times in the 90s to Cuba to interview Papu, who he calls the Kurt Cobain of the freakies.
Those are two friends of Papo's, Jesus Diaz and Luis Hernandez, who was also a bandmate of his.
So Luis remembers the first time he met Papo, and it was...
on a night that a Communist Party meeting was taking place right outside his house.
Your father hid when he saw him coming with the American flag on his head.
You can see video of Papo because Vladimir shot a documentary in 1994 where he interviewed Papo and some of the other frikis.
And in that documentary, Papo talks about growing up poor.
And a few years later, he makes a decision that's really at the heart of this story.
What happened was that in 1989, I think, or 1990... Somewhere around there, the Cuban government is fighting in Angola.
It's backing a leftist liberation movement, and it's kind of a proxy war with the United States.
And in the late 80s, Cuban soldiers start coming back home.
And some soldiers from the Cuban army that were in Africa, they came with HIV.
And because of that, the government has all the people in Cuba tested with HIV.
If you belong to a high-risk group, you were tested.
They went to my ward, and they tested everybody over there in the radio station.
Vlad says they would come in, take your blood, and if they found that you were positive... The police came, put you in the police car,
like a rocker here, they are doing a lot of things to me.
He told me, look, I went to this rock concert in Villa Clara.
And I went and took a syringe, drew some blood from their arm, and I put the needle in my own arm.
I get myself with blood contaminated with HIV, you know.
And I look at him and said, man, do you know what you did?
He knew for sure that when he did that, that that was a death sentence?
Vladimir's not quite sure that the others that came after Papo really knew what they were doing.
When you don't have any more doors to open, death is a door.
Coming up, that door gets wider, others walk through.
And for at least a beat, they find something besides death.
Let's go back to his story about Cuba and music in the late 80s and 90s.
And so far, a dude has made a crazy decision, a dude named Papo, to inject himself with HIV.
I think Papo would have called it a protest, but not the guys that came after him.
This is at a moment when there was a cultural war happening between the Castro government and anyone it deemed antisocial, which included kids with long hair who listened to rock.
And it was also a moment where if you were found to be HIV positive in Cuba, you were forcibly quarantined.
So Papo injects himself and he gets sent to the sanitarium.
Well, he found a beautiful place in the middle of the Pinar del Rio countryside.
It's full of palm trees, very green, very lush, farm animals roaming in.
I was there, and there are still farm animals over there.
Actually, they would roam in as a couple of cows and chickens.
So I went there to visit the last two rockers that still remain in the place, Gerson Gobea and his wife, Yohandra.
And they're kind of like the keepers of all that went down in there, the memories.
So I spent a couple of days with them, and they walked me around.
And you're saying this place was idyllic even back then?
Gerson and Johan are walking me through it, and they're like, okay, so we would be walking around here 10 years ago, and Nirvana would be coming out of here.
Yeah, so it was like a headbanger's ball in Pinar del Rio, you know?
I mean, how come they were able to have that freedom in the sanatorium but not outside?
Initially, the sanitarium system was under the military, and it was...
But in the late 80s, early 90s, the sanitariums went from the military being in charge to the Ministry of Health and Medicine.
And these were, by all accounts, very progressive doctors, very concerned about their patients.
They gave them all the food and medicine they needed.
So it was like a prison, but it was also kind of a little bubble of freedom.
And strangely enough, they soon found out that they even had power.
The patients, they said the sanitarium could go out every 21 days for a day trip.
And some of the freakies would go out, and just by flashing their ID cards that said they were AIDS patients, police would leave them alone.
I remember on two or three occasions that the police came after them, and one of them has a syringe.
And Vladdy says the guy took out the blood and waved it at the police.
And so word began to spread about what life was like inside the sanitarium.
Almost overnight after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was left without the massive subsidies it used to get.
Vladimir Ceballos, who never actually lived inside the sanitarium, he says that people outside were going hungry and he...
He himself... I was weighing like 100 pounds, 98 pounds.
You see like a hungry, sunburned, dehydrated... 50,000 people leave Cuba.
They manage to escape on a raft and make it to the Florida Keys.
These days, more Cubans than ever are taking the risk.
It was the big crisis, you know, in the Clinton era.
Yeah, just being able to get milk and an egg and beans.
Bob Ariano says that that was a big motivation for a lot of kids.
And it went from being a couple of self-injectors, a couple of dozen self-injectors, to being hundreds.
And did the government know that this was happening?
Well, there's this Swedish documentary from the time, it's called Socialismo Muerte, and in it there's this bishop of Havana...
His last name is Céspedes, and he says that he met some of the kids that were injecting themselves with AIDS, and that at a state dinner, he approached Fidel.
These kids, they're injecting themselves, and Fidel... Couldn't believe it.
And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell syringe anymore.
They put a law that if you inject and sell with HIV, you're going to spend eight years in prison.
And all of a sudden, you have all these bands forming across the island in different sanitariums.
In the biggest one of them all, in Santiago de la Vega, Los Cocos, which is like a half hour, 45 minutes south of Havana, you have the first group that gets formed.
But then in the center of the island, in this town called Santa Clara, you had the Cuban punk band Escoria, and Escoria translates as... Scum, right?
And according to Bob, if you look back to the 80s, the people who were fleeing Cuba... The balseros, the rafters.
One of the responses of the Cuban government were billboards that said, Que vaya la Escoria.
So to call yourself Escoria, to call yourself scum... That... Is...
And were these bands big outside the sanatorium too?
Escoria is, I mean, you can't talk about Cuban punk without, I mean, Escoria is like... So their tapes got out or something?
I mean, these bands are forming, kids are self-injecting.
There's tape of Herson and Yohandra saying that it got to be so fashionable that kids started to think that in order to be a freaky, you had to have AIDS.
Which is, and the kids were saying that if you really wanted to be a rocker in that time, you had to have AIDS.
There was even talk among some of the young people I met of thinking that, oh, eventually Fidel and those guys will find a cure.
But everything started to change when the first of them died.
According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinar del Rio was a guy named Manuel.
And when the second died, and when the third died, everything stopped.
At one point in Vladi's documentary, which was made in 1994, Papo says that in two years, about 18 people died.
And they start seeing how you die, because you don't die like a...
A normal person when they had a heart attack or anything.
Did kids start saying they wish they hadn't done this?
Well, when you see Vladi's documentary and that Swedish documentary, Socialismo Muerte, which was made in 1995, you definitely see the kids having deep regrets.
And in that Swedish documentary, there's a scene towards the end where you see Papo and he's clearly sick.
And we see him stepping into an evangelical church.
He's found this community of evangelical Christians that accepts AIDS patients.
and that he thinks that Christ is the perfect communist.
If more communists were like the Christians, that would be perfect.
It's interesting though, because in that last video, we also see him taking English classes.
And he's saying like, you know, the other patients in the sanitarium, they're like sick like me.
And a few months later, according to Gerson, Papo started to bleed out from his mouth and eyes.
He became violent, and he died from that disease.
God, part of me wonders, like, is this strong and fierce, or is it just...
Yeah, well, I think it can be all those things, right?
Here's how Luis puts it, not even five years after Papo died.
Make of it what you will, but December 8th, 2000, Castro unveils the statue of John Lennon.
They're given permission to play a bunch of rock shows in Cuba, out in the open, and at one of those shows in Pinar del Rio.
I announced, listen, we're going to send out this next number to Papo La Bala and the Freakies.
Now, it would be impossible to draw any kind of cause and effect and say one thing led to another.
But Luis says that back when the freakies were streaming into the sanatorium... Cuba wasn't changing back then.
It started to change precisely because of a hundred gestures, big and small.
He says around Cuba at that moment, there are all of these tiny, mostly silent protests taking hold.
And then you have the maleconazo, which was like the first serious civil disobedience that Castro had in 94, where just a mob
in Havana rose up because they were so tired of the power outages.
They were leaving the city in rafts by the thousands, by the hundreds.
Castro literally had to come down to the Cuban Malecon, the beautiful seaside road that circles around Havana.
you know late 80s early 90s there's this breeding ground of discontent all over cuba and i think the self-injector movement is the best crystallization we have of that yeah it's like this sort of a thousand points of light and this is the brightest point right or the darkest point frankly right exactly
Since this story first ran, Bob Arellano has continued traveling to Cuba to work with Latimer Ceballos on a documentary about the self-injector movement and the Cuban rock scene.
He's the self-injected punk rocker I visited in the abandoned sanatorium.
He's still living there, along with his partner, Yoandra.
He tells me that with Cuba's deep political and economic crisis, it's hard to be in a punk band.
His town has 18-hour blackouts, and even plugging in a guitar is tough.
But Gerson says he still thinks about Papo La Bala.
He says that in today's Cuba, Papo would be doing the same thing he did when he was alive.
He would be finding a way to stay true to himself and keeping it metal.