One in a series of posts about Cuban bloggers, in the hope of providing them deserved attention and some needed protection from the Castro dictatorship. Read other similar posts, here.
Luis Felipe Rojas
I'd like to think Cuban blogger Luis Felipe Rojas and I are cousins, if only distantly.
My grandfather was Raimundo Masferrer Rojas, and like the blogger, he was from Holguín, in eastern Cuba.
It would be an honor to have someone like Luis Felipe Rojas in my family.
In a short time, he has used his blog, Cruzar las alambradas (in English, "Crossing the Barbed Wire") to paint vivid portraits of life in Cuba. And as his accounts of events surrounding the death of political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo revealed, he is a helluva journalist.
Here is a recent post:This year, without any doubt, will be the year of Cuban youth. For the most part, it is already happening. Those who hold red cards (Communist Youth IDs) in each of the provinces witnessed the freckled and shaky Machado Ventura, who traveled all over the island in order to prepare the Cuban Youth Congress, and afterward chose who would go to the capital in a similar fashion. There they spoke of everything from the human to the divine and were promised everything.
But there remain doubts that are so unavoidable that not even the troops who leveled Tienanmen could get around them. We still have a concert with Gorki and Porno Para Ricardo, after his return from the land of the Aztecs and his peregrinations through the north, or “Yankeelandia.”
We are anxiously awaiting for the boys of Zona Franca’s return to the urban reality, at the side of the cultural commissars and over them the bureaucracy that consumes free art in Cuba.
The clandestine books which we have so desperately waited for will eventually come, other bloggers, braver and more informed than we are, will appear. The island will be full of kids tweeting for less than 1 CUC per text message.
There will be a line of people from Guantánamo to Remates de Guane with their right hands outstretched because the G2 will return the confiscated mobile phones, the laptops dismembered in the police stations and other belongings that suffered worse luck.
This year I will get on a plane to Havana without having to stand in a three-day line or climb into the back of a truck… so I say.
Sometimes I catch a little dose of optimism. It embarrasses me.
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