Maykel Osorbo: “Nothing Good Has Ever Happened To Me.”
By Carlos Manuel Alvarez (El Estornudo)
HAVANA TIMES – “Get off of me, you’re heavy,” reads the band on the straw hat Maykel Osorbo wears in the Pinar del Rio prison known as Kilometer 5 and a half. “It’s wide-brimmed,” he tells me, then raps some fiery bars he’s written in prison and needs someone beyond the inmates to hear. Someone from outside.
«Mi historia nunca fue por dólares ni por divisas. / El pundonor que me distingue vive en mi sonrisa. /Se me calcula un clásico como la Mona Lisa. / Yo me inmolé por mis razones, no por una visa».
“My story was never about dollars or hard currency / The honor that distinguishes me lives in my smile. / I believe I’m a classic, like the Mona Lisa / I sacrificed myself for my own reasons, not to get a visa.”
Maykel has filled four notebooks with verses and continues incorporating ever more words that he fishes out of a dictionary and also uses to argue with the guards and impress them, because they “can’t keep up”. He’s one of Cuba’s most prominent political prisoners, serving a nine-year prison sentence since the spring of 2021. “Black, uppity, and right out of the ghetto,” he tells me.
I ask him if he wears his hat when he goes out to the prison yard to stretch his legs, but he doesn’t much like that rationed sun. “I wear it here, inside the galley.” His latest songs – and I hear three others over the course of several phone calls he’s allowed to make from prison – refer frequently to various black heroes from Cuba’s War of Independence.
Mi rebeldía es diferente./ Yo calenté y caí como El León de Oriente. / Me fue guiando mi pasión cuando ‘to se puso feo / el descenso fue en San Pedro como el general Maceo. / Yo me embosqué con mi propia guerra en mi frontera / No claudiqué y me batí como Quintín Banderas. / Nunca delegué y me mantuve firme en mi morada / y al final me definí como el general Moncada.
[“My rebellion is distinct. / I got fired up and fell like the Lion of the East. / I was holding in my passion when everything got ugly, / the fall came in San Pedro, like our General Maceo. / I ambushed myself with my own war on my border, / I didn’t give up and I churned like Quintin Banderas. / I never delegated but stood firmly where I lived / and in the end defined my route like General Moncada.”]
These are the dead of his cemetery, the saints on his altar, and the ghosts of his confinement. That’s the reason for the hat that Maykel wears inside the jail, as if he were on the Paralejo battleground, fighting for Cuban independence from Spain. You have to understand that hat as an object that morally sustains his prison sentence as well as polishing and giving concrete form to the symbols of his consciousness, the same way the dictionary does. Maykel behaves like a Cimarron – that figure that has been stripped of everything except his dead, and who now uses that patrimony to forge an empire.
However, Maykel isn’t an anachronistic prisoner either. He doesn’t walk around the jail dressed as a mambi [guerilla soldier from the 19th century] about to perform at a morning school assembly. He likes clothes, name-brand stuff, flashy costume jewelry. Anamely Ramos described him: “Like a kindly neighborhood rag-tag man, Maykel is a living magnet for other people’s discards. He shows it in the three or even four pieces of clothing he wears, mixing underwear, lycra, shorts, and pants. He enjoys the feeling of extra protection that clothes, or objects in general, provide. Caps sometimes – also more than one – handkerchiefs, sharp objects, Santeria accessories, rosaries, chain-link bracelets.”
At the time she saw him, Maykel told her that he wore all this so that if he were imprisoned again – as in fact he was – he could “shed his clothes layer by layer, and not be dirty at any time. Today he has asked his close friends to buy him a Festina watch as well as two pairs of Vans sneakers and some “smart” glasses.
Friends recently sent him a shampoo that prevents or slows baldness, because Maykel is going bald in prison. “But I haven’t been able to use it,” he says. “I don’t know how it’s applied, since the instructions are in English.” His other cherished object is a crucifix without a Christ. “I took him off of there, took him down. He doesn’t have to be there, he rose again three days later,” he explains to me, as if he lived in Salt Lake City and was another exemplary disciple of Joseph Smith. Nor does he believe in the cult of death as the fundamental symbol of the faith, although he does believe in the sacrifice, and the guiding principle of permanent sacrifice as the ultimate life limit, (at least of the life that luck has dealt him up to now), and in the delivery of the body to a transcendent order through punishment.
Among our people, we call that transcendent order “freedom for Cuba” or “end of the dictatorship.” But for Maykel it doesn’t seem divorced from joy, not even in the extreme conditions in which he finds himself. On the other hand, neither does it hint of that agitation or hysteria typical of Cuban political conversations. That doesn’t mean that Maykel wouldn’t want to be in the streets right now, like so many, or that he doesn’t long for the ideological-military fortress of Castroism to be swept away overnight by a definitive popular wave of disgust. However, his path of desire never deviates from a meticulously cultivated suspicion, distrust and caution. His road has been long, amid poverty and discrimination that never let up. They began before the notion of dictatorship caught up with him, and he’s convinced these conditions will continue when it’s all over, if something like this ever ends.
“I’m not lucky,” he says. “Nothing good has ever happened to me.” The energetic tone with which he says this is in direct contrast with the statement itself. The psychological fortitude of such a prisoner is not a uniform, rocky or flat quality, as those of us who have not been through such violent events tend to believe.
The course of our conversation reveals a prisoner made up of an emotional collage. That doesn’t mean that the prisoner, subjected to uncertainty, blows like a weather vane from one mood to another, or that one day I find him sad, and the next euphoric. I mean that the prisoner has built a shield around his heart like some pop sculpture, with mended spots or patches of emotions that weave a protective ensemble. His will is balanced with his anger, he mixes weariness with wonder, embellishes resignation with a very fine thread of hand-stitched hope, expressed, of course, as conviction.
His hope is in no way linked to optimism, but to the joy that the prisoner experiences by giving ethical meaning to the succession of arrests, imprisonments, beatings and defamations he has systematically endured. The chaotic form of the injustice – in itself a method to disperse and dismantle the individual conscience – manages to align itself as a purpose on the victim’s horizon. Cleansed of fear or anxiety, he assumes the pragmatism necessary for the pursuit of his survival by endowing it with a messianic sense of a martyr’s destiny. “I don’t want to die, but death justifies my journey,” the prisoner tells himself in the moments when he studies his own blurry face in the penitentiary steel mirrors.
This narration overcomes the fear that accompanies finiteness. A victim who manages to empower themself with the threads of their own story becomes immune to outside control, diminishable only through complete annihilation. Survival and life above the fray are indistinguishable categories. One more day, one more hour, but with eternity already won. You have to address yourself with devotion and ecstasy to resist the prison policies.
“My name is Maykel Osorbo,” he states. “According to the [Yoruba] religion, you’re osogbo – all screwed up – for a time, but later you become ire, you’re rewarded. With me, that all got lost, it doesn’t work. My osogbo is literally forever. It’s lapidario – set in stone.” Since he acquired that word lapidario, it’s one that Maykel uses as much as he can. He sprinkles it here and there. Given the tales he has to tell, it’s a useful word, one which he turns to all the time.
I know few people, maybe no one, as obsessed with accumulating new words. These are then dropped like stones that come from who-knows-where, to suddenly land in the middle of a sentence like sounds letting loose, detached from any structure or context, whose exactness can sometimes be irrelevant. It’s not that Maykel doesn’t understand what word fell into his hands; or that he uses them senselessly, like a dilletante guided by his whims. It’s more that the words exert fascination over him through his appreciation of their strangeness, or the parameters of their interior rhythm, rather than their practical efficiency, or their outside semantic burden.
Those who rap understand that no matter where or how they’re found, a word generates a habitat of its own meaning. Their power holds an exclusive value, and they’re treated as talismans. To me, this also has a material explanation: it’s a consequence of extreme poverty. I allow myself to look inwards – on tiptoe, but in the end inwards – to the unprecedented past years, felt even more harshly in the life of Maykel Osorbo. The well of experiences that preceded his recognition as an artist and a dissident. Maykol asks for words like he asks for clothing and shoes, and he recurs to the dictionary like someone visiting a store. Nike Air Jordans or the adjective lapidario – the one makes him as happy as the other.
His sign under the Yoruba religion is Ogbeche, and although he reminds me that the Ifa divination system is interpretive, one of Ogbeche’s principle characteristics is the loss of reason. “’Suffering from transitory madness attacks.’ That’s me. I’m a transitory madness. I climb up the palm tree and go crazy.”
Maykel was never particularly interested in the news, or the brief exaltation that was felt in mid-January by thousands of families and civic activists inside and outside the country, after a slapdash and hastily reverted negotiation between Washington and Havana, with the merciful intervention of the Vatican, promised to remove Cuba from the list of countries sponsors of terrorism in exchange for the liberation of a bunch of political prisoners on the island. The prison releases eventually benefited 192 sentenced prisoners of this nature, but ceased as soon as the new Republican administration arrived at the White House. Barely hours after their return to control of the United States, the Trump administration put Cuba back on the list, revoking the executive order Joe Biden had signed at the last minute.
“How was that for you?” I asked him.
“I always spend my time connected to the trees, to the gods. I haven’t even heard anything about that. I’m focused on the end of my nine years [prison sentence] in 2030. That movie doesn’t even interest me. My focus is on one thing alone, called 2030, the grand fulfillment of my work.”
“What can you tell me about the prisoners they freed.”
“Great love for them. That’s great that they set them free. They should behave but not change their principles. If you change your principles, you lose the concept. Principles aren’t negotiable.”
“Did you see them release anyone from the Kilometer 5 ½ prison?”
“No, I don’t see that they let anyone out. What I see is that there are ever more coming in. They don’t let out here, they bring in.”
“And why didn’t you connect with the news, with the rumors?”
“I can’t set my head to thinking if a possibility exists or not. That movie is no good. It scars you, it destroys you. I have to exercise; I have to try and eat well. I have to fight – this here is fucked up. Just fucked up.”
“But you must have thought about it at some moment, had some illusory hopes.”
“No, nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“The other day I put myself in that movie. I was in the Yard and all my muscles went tight, my blood pressure started rising. You start thinking for a second about something as tumultuous as what’s happening, and you realize – brother… just let it go. What’s the use of thinking about leaving! I think about 2030 – if I think about anything else, I go crazy.”
The first thing he’s going to do when he gets out of jail, he says, “is shine”, and later organize a huge concert with everyone in Cuba’s urban scene. “Without discriminating against anyone, because everyone is royal in their own way. If you give them their space, if you respect them, everyone in the world is royal.”
Before finishing the last of the calls, Maykel sings a pop ballad that he imagines in the voice of Descemer Bueno [Cuban singer and songwriter]. It’s a song about lost love that no one who one day hears it would imagine was composed in the depths of a totalitarian regime’s jail cell, lost in the countryside.
En mi cama solo faltas tú. / Hay tristeza desde que se fue tu luz. / Las mañanas nublan mi razón de ser / y la noche me hace enloquecer, también. [“You’re the only thing missing in my bed tonight. / There’s only sorrow since I lost your light / The mornings cloud my reason to be / And the night as well leaves me all crazy.”]
I tell him to take care of himself.
“Don’t worry,” he answers, “I’m here with Christ and the phenomena.”
çFirst published in Spanish by El Estornudo and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.