May Your Wings Carry You to Freedom
HAVANA TIMES – Rodolfo Rensoli has died, the person who made real the dream of a Hip Hop festival in East Havana—for at least six editions.
The censors of art and thought made sure to extinguish the powerful event, just as they’ve done with the entire countercultural movement in Cuba.
You know that death is right there, ready to take anyone. You know that the breath you’re taking now is the only sure one, because the next one may or may not come. That’s how fragile our connection is to this world that hypnotizes us with its solid walls, intoxicating flavors, and the endless fabrication of plans.
El Renso, as we called him, died in the sea, accidentally, in the middle of hatching one of his exuberant plans. I’d like to think that his passing was gentle, and that the Creator put him to sleep, sparing him the violence of being ripped from this shell that weighs so much (as the Little Prince said).
News of his death and what followed came to us in pieces, from different sources: that he was at the beach with some friends, that he would be laid out in the funeral home in Guanabacoa—his native neighborhood, which he always spoke so highly of—and that his body would be cremated. We still don’t know if his ashes were scattered, or where. That’s how isolated we are in this inevitable inxile, resisting through a process of destruction that grows more outrageous by the day.
It’s hard to imagine that my husband was once part of GrupoUno, the project responsible for creating those powerful festivals that earned Alamar the honorable title of “The City of Rap.”
A city that has been dying off, like the alternative art that once sprang from it, wild and free. Now, only nature remains—where, luckily, we’re still dazzled by the orange explosion of flamboyant trees, amid streets with no buses, empty markets, abandoned pets, and hateful blackouts.
Everyone who knew el Renso knows that he carried the death of the Rap festival like the death of a child. It was his masterpiece, but his versatile genius kept hatching new and crazy projects; his intense gestures were part of that insatiable creative potential.
Precisely because of the infectious intensity of his personality, it’s so hard to process the news of his passing and to think: never again.
I remember when I met him in 1990, at the Fayad Jamís art gallery. His bright eyes, his talkativeness, and the future morphing in our young minds, taking on radiant—oh, glorious—forms.
Back then, Renso, the painter Carlos Guzmán (freshly graduated from San Alejandro and doing his social service in Alamar), and I would spend time together in so many (then vibrant) cultural spaces.
I still remember the taste of black tea with lemon, a leftover from the alliance with the now-dissolved Soviet Union—wherever our gatherings took place. That delicious tea and the eternal intellectual and philosophical musings, leafing through art books and listening to music on players where the sound was still imperfect.
We even dreamed of sharing a home, the three of us, as only artists know how—and dare—to do.
So now I look back and realize how far we’ve come, with the astonishment of having been swept away so brutally by the current of life.
Not by the pragmatism of material progress, not by the accumulated indifference of the years, not by political differences… but by the silent and malignant corrosion that has devastated our own Island.
As survivors of this imminent disaster, each of us went on doing what we could, preserving what is most precious to us: art, and our capacity to create. A space still sacred and inaccessible to those who destroy freedom.
Safe travels, Renso, brother of dreams. And if you must return to this earth, may it be when joy-filled festivals are no longer cut short. When the voices now being silenced in universities are allowed to grow. When we can shine as who we truly are: a noble people who only want to thrive by the natural right to live—through art, and in everything.