A Light on My Path

A Light on My Path / Angel Santiesteban
Posted on May 25, 2014

I Raise My Glass to Freedom Day

I must confess that when they seized Raul Rivero in the Black Spring,
and he was part of “The Group of 75″ that was seeking political change
in Cuba, at that time I had no political conscience, or maybe I did not
want to have one. My thinking protected me and I needed to believe my
literary teachers who insisted that the work was primary and that from
writing we should fight for change, that books were our rifles and words
our bullets.

I do not doubt that is true, but there was a moment in which it was not
enough for me, and so I have recognized on many occasions, and when I
ripped off the mask that covered my face — stuck there since my birth,
weathered and clinging to my skin throughout the time of my education —
then I felt for the first time the cool, clean air caressing my skin.

My shame obliged me to start the blog. I felt that I had a double debt:
to all the national readership — where I perceived the need for the
fight — and to my contemporaries, in particular and especially to the
great Cuban poet Raul Rivero, who abandoned the life of a passive writer
with which he collected great achievements in order to become one of the
fiercest critics of totalitarianism. There was an instant where it all
began, and his face, poetry and attitude towards life were made present,
and I wanted to continue in his footsteps. The bar is very high, like
his poetry.

Maybe you will not believe it, but at this moment, while I write this
post, I was interrupted by Officer Abat — one of the many bosses of this
prison — and he tried to assert his authority over me, he wanted me to
notice that he was prohibiting my family from coming to see me.

When I ignored him, he asserted that he was going to win — I suppose he
was referring to a dose of suffering for me — then I assured him that he
would never beat me because for me a cell was a badge of honor, but that
I recognized that he could do it as a henchman, abuser, weak in manhood,
and several other things that — in the heat of the moment — occurred to me.

He screamed at me to shut up, and I told him that they would never
achieve it, certainly not on a day like today. Finally, he left
threatening, surely looking for help in the headquarters to make me pay
for my rebelliousness.

Today is Free Press Day, and this is the best way I have to honor it.
And it is also the best day to express my gratitude to the great Raul
Rivero, who lights the free path with his lantern of poetry, who in his
turn inherited from the master of all, Jose Marti.

Angel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton prison settlement. May 2014.

To sign the petition for Amnesty International to declare Cuban
dissident Angel Santiesteban a prisoner of conscience follow this link.
https://secure.avaaz.org/es/petition/Para_que_Amnistia_Internacional_declare_prisionero_de_conciencia_al_disidente_cubano_Angel_Santiesteban/?fbss

Translated by mlk.

15 May 2014

Source: A Light on My Path / Angel Santiesteban | Translating Cuba –
http://translatingcuba.com/a-light-on-my-path-angel-santiesteban/