The New Cuba Says: Kill, God forgives

Dmitri Prieto

HAVANA TIMES — A small businessman had this sign up on his stand, located on Havana’s Infanta Street.

A threatening portrayal of the new Cuban race, a fearful fragment of theology, which inverts St. Augustine de Hippo’s philosopy of “Love and do what you will.”

I was impressed by it. It had an excellent design, the stuff of my nightmares when I was a child.

According to Roberto Veiga and Lenier Gonzalez, who are today activists for Cuba Posible, Latin American gangs have wanted to bring their business to Cuba for years. Additionally, Gilbertman – the infamous fraudster of yankee Medicare and promoter of Cuban reggaeton – helped feed the young Cuban imagination with a dose of violent adrenaline.

However, even without gangs and Gilbertman, we know what the outcome of our social disaster is going to be.

A quick search on Google brought up the following:

“Kill, God forgives” is a song from the traditional band Trio Matamoros, who belonged to the golden age of Cuban music. In the early 2000s, a Cuban film also had this title.

The sign this businessman had up on display was in fact an (ammended) poster of this film. It had been ammended in a special way: references to the film had been covered masterfully in red paint so they couldn’t be seen at all. This wasn’t an act of censorship but of semantic reprofiling: the content of the poster no longer refers to the film, but communicates what the phrase in the title actually means.

You don’t have to go to El Salvador anymore to know what Cuba’s future looks like.