The Blog of Cuba’s Silvio Rodriguez

Dmitri Prieto

I just visited Cuban trova musician Silvio Rodriguez’s blog.  I learned about it through a news story that featured his statement when he was being given a journalism award.  At that time he said, “Everything done to destroy the ultra-conservative bureaucracy will result in benefits for the country.”

Silvio added, “The bureaucracy is very intelligent, (very) astute, it retrenches and seeks to make itself indispensable, or appear to be so.”

On the television news they mentioned that the singer-songwriter also said that his journalistic activity consisted of maintaining a blog.

Curious, I went to that site with the hope of finding his words concerning the bureaucratic cancer that resists the living forces of our country.  But none of that was there.

Instead I found that Silvio had loaded the site with lots of photos (which took an unbearably long time to open due to the snail pace of our connections here), along with a countless number of poems by himself and other authors.

I enjoyed re-reading many of those, such as the lyrics to the song “Giron: preludio.” the only war-related song there, and which — in my opinion — is perfectly comparable in its tragic and symbolic vigor to the war songs of the great Russian folk musicians.

He also had essays, writings by Latin American authors (such as Frei Betto and Eduardo Galeano), some interviews, messages of thanks to all the people (name by  name) who worked on organizing his recent concerts in Cuba (Silvio, why are there so few of those concerts?).

The site had an enviable number of comments for a blog (100-200 approximately) – well, understanding that the blogger’s name is Silvio Rodriguez.

Then suddenly there appeared “Architecture in Varadero Threatened by Tourism,” by my friend Dalia Acosta (a writer with IPS).  What’s more, that post came from no less than Havana Times(!)  This gave me big kick, not only for the source but also for the critical nature of the writing by Dalia.

In Silvio’s blog one can also find (published on Saturday, March 19, 2011) “Le deseo a Libia algo mejor que Gadafi.  Y a la bota extranjera que la humille le deseo un Vietnam” (For Libya I Wish Someone Better than Gaddafi, and to the Foreign Forces Humiliating It, I Wish Them a Vietnam), which had 270 comments at the time of my writing this entry.

I don’t have enough Internet connection time to read blogs, but I was very glad to find for the first time things like those that in Silvio’s diary.

Obviously, I believe that I might differ with many of Silvio stances.  We’re not living in the epic and controversial times of the ‘60s, but we surely share in respecting the right and duty to differ.  Let’s hope that the voice of Silvio continues being an ally of today’s youth in this new and controversial epic to now destroy the mortal cancer of the bureaucracy.