Rebellious Youth the Cuban Government Wants to Silence
The detention of Ernesto Medina and Kamil Zayas is a warning to Cubans under 40: emigrate before repression catches up with you.
HAVANA TIMES — My generation has packed its bags. And those of us who still remain on the Island have had to learn another form of heartbreak: saying goodbye to our children. Watching them leave not only with a backpack on their shoulders, but with the certainty that staying means risking the gag, perpetual poverty, or prison.
Young Cubans today live a cruel dilemma: remain in the country where they were born, muzzled and subjected to a crisis with no expiration date, or leave for territories where everything begins from zero, but where at least one can speak without fear. The arrest, Friday, of Ernesto Medina and Kamil Zayas, members of the El4tico project, is a stark warning aimed at Cubans under 40: emigrate before repression reaches you.
“If you are watching or reading this, it’s because they finally found a way to lock me up, to try to put a temporary gag on me,” Zayas says in a message written before his detention and circulated this Saturday. “They are not arresting me for stealing, for assaulting, for trafficking, nor for any common crime,” he clarifies. “They are arresting me for the only ‘crime’ a dictatorship does not tolerate, daring to look it in the face and say out loud what we all notice: their colossal failings, their chronic inefficiencies, their systematic injustices, and the oppression that crushes the dignity of an entire people.”
That testimony is not a rhetorical piece but an indictment. In a country where too many young people are trapped in the claws of el químico (synthetic drug), others spend hours sitting on sidewalks with nothing to do, and a majority dream of taking to the sea or boarding a plane that will get them out of here as soon as possible, these two young men from Holguín have chosen the most dangerous path: to stay and speak.
With their videos they have unsettled those in power because they have renounced coded language, fear, and self-censorship. In front of an old blackboard and with a fan that seems less to move air than to try to stir social inertia, Medina and Zayas have connected with an audience fed up with slogans and hungry for stories rooted in real life.
While official spaces insist on the worn-out slogan of “creative resistance,” El4tico has shown a country where the unpopularity of the Communist Party is growing, patience is running out, and the imposed political model is drawing fewer and fewer adherents. Where Miguel Diaz-Canel takes hours to string together clumsy phrases that provoke a long national yawn, Medina and Zayas have opted for direct, relatable, even likable language. In their videos there are no poses or contrived scripts: there is spontaneity, irony, and a sincerity the system does not know how to handle.
“Speak louder. Be dignified. Because history does not forgive those who stay silent out of convenience,” Zayas left written before a police operation ended with his arrest and that of his colleague. That phrase now reverberates in a society marked by absences, by empty seats at family tables, and by the fear of ending up behind bars for an opinion, a social media post, or a criticism spoken aloud.
Repression not only imprisons bodies; it also pushes people into exile, cancels the future, and empties the country of its youngest voices. Each arrest like this confirms that telling the truth remains, in Cuba, the most dangerous and most necessary act.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.