Esteban Lázaro Rodríguez López

“Well, 'San Isidro' was a before and after in my life. We arrived in San Isidro, Luis Manuel Alcántara called me and told me: 'Esteban, we are going to make a pilgrimage, we are going to apply our struggle there, to demand the freedom of Denis Solís, a contracted artist, who they had him arbitrarily in the prison Combinado de Este sanctioned for eight months. And several people got together, independent journalists, visual artists, street workers, young people, a very diverse group, we gathered there first of all to do the act that I'm telling you about, the act of a pilgrimage. When we saw outside, we were completely surrounded by the repressive patrol of the State Security.”

“Culture is indoctrinated, threatened, you can say that, if you say: 'I'm not interested,' if you are the singer and you don't sing what I want you to sing, I'll take you away... you won't sing on any radio, no television, just won’t go to any public place, they won't allow you to do it. If you are a painter and you don't paint what I want you to paint and you don't do what I want you to do, you simply manifest yourself in another way, they don't let you flow as an artist, they don't let you be as a person, and they repress you simply for wanting to express your free art. You are an artist; you want free art. You don't want to be controlled and listen: 'Hey, Esteban, paint, for example, paint, if you are a painter, paint a picture of the riverbank, I want to paint a picture with a flower, not a riverbank. ' We see one way and another that the dictatorship and everything around influences, you must get a permit, everything has to do with [Decree] 349. Decree 349 was to control the artists and put pressure on them, and keep them all under control, everyone under control.”

“Identifying myself with all the people, with the neighbours around me, in the same area where I live, where there are many single women with children, there are many elderly people who don't even have enough to feed themselves. I started this job, and I saw that I liked it, but I also started to be harassed by the Department of State Security. As the level went up, and the State Security Department went up, simply for denouncing me, for speaking out on my social networks. That's when 'Decree 370' came, by which they fined me for simply denouncing on social media the things that were happening in Cuba. They started to threaten me with this. They summoned my wife, which, I’m telling you, was severe. They summoned her to the police station as well. They told her to please leave me, to vote me out of the house, threatening her that she would also suffer the consequences of what I was doing. Also, I began to suffer the attacks on my daughters.”