The legal farce against Angel Santiesteban reminds me of the celebrated storyteller Reinaldo Arenas and the poets Heberto Padilla and Raul Rivero

The legal farce against Angel Santiesteban reminds me of the celebrated
storyteller Reinaldo Arenas and the poets Heberto Padilla and Raul Rivero
Posted on July 7, 2013
Three memories of Angel Santiesteban
Miguel Iturria Savon

September 2, 2011, I published on Cubanet the article SOS for Angel
Santiesteban, then harassed by the political police of the Cuban
government in spite of being a writer awarded multiple prizes by the
regime's own institutions.

At the end of 2012 Angel was sentenced to five years in prison after a
rigged trial in which they used his ex-wife as a lance point against
him. I will not refer to the details of the case, because they still
circulate in various writings and on Santesteban's blog, but to my
personal impressions about this wordsmith.

Before personally knowing the author of Dreams of a Summer Day, The
Children Nobody Wanted, Happy Are They Who Mourn, and South: Latitude
13, I read his books and heard several anecdotes that reflect his
temperament and satirize the Cuban political situation. It is hard to
forget some characters from his stories about jail and the Cuban
intervention in the African wars. Maybe the masterful design of those
alienated beings that gallop on the pages of his works are the true
cause of the degrading judicial process that attempts to nullify his
rebellion and the voice of this audacious and mask-free man.

As my son was the lawyer for Angel Santiesteban I had the privilege of
receiving him in my Havana home and speaking with him over a glass of
water — Angel does not drink rum or coffee. We spoke of literature and
of his family experience. Only on one occasion, on asking him about one
of his characters, did he reveal to me the traumatic imprint of his
brief prison stay before turning 20 years of age after being detained on
the north coast while saying goodbye to a relative who tried to leave
the island on a raft.

I encountered Santiesteban several times in the home of blogger Yoani
Sanchez and in the cultural gatherings organized in the residence of the
physicist Antonio Rodiles, leader of the Estado de Sats program. I
remember that Angel barely intervened in the debates and sat almost
always at the end of the room, far from posturing and prominence but
cordial to whoever approached him. In the end he would leave in his car
with four or five others whom he took to or near their homes.

The last time that we met was across from the Infanta and Manglar Police
station, next to the building "Fame and Applause," where half a hundred
opponents demanded the liberation of Antonio Rodiles, detained after the
burial of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, dead in a suspicious accident. There we
talked while Wilfredo Vallin and Reinaldo Escobar tried to negotiate
with the Station Chief, also surrounded by a band of delinquents who
awaited orders from Security officers to kick and drag the opponents.

The legal farce against Angel Santiesteban reminds me of the celebrated
storyteller Reinaldo Arenas and the poets Heberto Padilla — incarcerated
in 1971 — and Raul Rivero — sentenced in 2003 — victims of a
dictatorship that sanctions freedom of expression and promotes the
quietism and complicit silence of intellectuals.

Translated by mlk

9 June 2013

Source: "The legal farce against Angel Santiesteban reminds me of the
celebrated storyteller Reinaldo Arenas and the poets Heberto Padilla and
Raul Rivero | Translating Cuba" -
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