Waking up in a Dictatorship

Waking up in a Dictatorship / Angel Santiesteban
Posted on March 22, 2014

From the time I was a kid I discovered that my feelings forced me to
show solidarity with the weakest. In sports I wanted to play on the most
competitive teams, and today it's the same. But I've always been on the
side against the Cuban dictatorship.

In the eighties, when my generation started thinking, we hated the
dictatorships in the world, especially those in Latin American; at that
time we didn't understand that Cuba lived under a totalitarian regime.

I still don't know where my need to express my feelings without worrying
about the consequences came from, even if the price is my own life.

The Cuban opposition, if I were asked to express it through a painting,
would be a huge tree in a gale of wind raging against its structure, and
despite its trunk, sometimes it leans, seeming as if it could touch the
ground, and even so, it endures all things, at times the wind carrying
away its branches, leaves, fruits, but always, irremediably always, it
recovers, and stands to wait and face the next onslaught.

The time remaining without freedom is impossible to predict, but the
forces of resistance seem to be sufficient and are multiplying.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Prison settlement of Lawton. March 2014.

Source: Waking up in a Dictatorship / Angel Santiesteban | Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/waking-up-in-a-dictatorship-angel-santiesteban/