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Cuban opposition figure Lía Villares has shared on her Facebook profile a text in which she recounts her experiences with State Security. In recent months, Villares has been involved in several incidents where she has closely experienced the repression of the authorities on the Island.
A little over a month ago, she was detained along with other young artists who were gathered at the independent gallery El Círculo, in Havana, located in the home of visual artist Luis Trápaga, where the play "Psicosis" was set to be presented as part of the Poetry Without End festival.
Among those detained on that occasion were also Tania Bruguera, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Yanelis Nuñez, and Amaury Pacheco. Videos published on social media showed how Cuban police violently repressed the attendees at the location. Villares would be one of the last to be released.
As part of the most recent detention, his work equipment was confiscated, which is why the complaint note was handwritten.
We hereby reproduce in full the text published by Lía Villares about her experience with State Security.
Imagine your worst nightmare. Imagine it materializing in real time, what you have sensed so many times, but it's no longer a lucid dream; now it is cold, hard reality. The most despicable being, the one you've dedicated yourself to denouncing because he is part of a repressive apparatus aimed at crushing you for speaking the truth and pursuing you for defending freedom, imagine him multiplied by an army of Smith agents (but without any class), an army of rats ready to invade your home and rummage through your belongings with a rodent's eagerness. This is the nauseating scene of your life: your privacy, your memories, all your recollections preserved over the years on small digital media, disks, your entire life in the hands of thugs trained to destroy all your work, your years of effort, your personal files, and ultimately confiscate everything in nylon bags with the word "criminalistics" printed on them, because that is precisely the treatment employed, under the flimsy excuse that you are "engaging in subversive or counter-revolutionary activities."
If you have read the novels The Master and Margarita or Doctor Zhivago, you might have a clearer idea of what it feels like to see your most intimate spaces invaded by a numerous group of harassing people eager to delve deeply into your private life. It’s a right that is far too individualistic, one that communism grants only to the royal family: they can indeed protect themselves from prying eyes. In your complete defenselessness, you find yourself exposed, even though you have always made an effort to avoid having secrets under the circumstances: you have even been bolder in presenting yourself as an exhibitionist, profoundly narcissistic in a failed act of irreverent protest.
No matter how hard you try to convince them that you have nothing to hide, that you even share everything, that you’ve followed the collectivist rhyme of not considering your privacy as a treasure so valuable, because you should share even your most intimate desires and your most precious dreams, your will is reflected in your actions. Your movements are quite careless because it has never made much sense, or it has not been your true intention, to conspire for "the cause," since you believe it should be the same for the few conscious, lucid, clear friends you have left. You have left all the groups because you find no coherence, humility, transparency, or simply the real friendship you have been searching for everywhere. You have seen a lot. You have traveled a long way only to arrive at the same point, time and again. You have lived through the hatred and humiliation of that sick, parasitic government, still blind with power.
In the journey, your trust and much of your faith in people slipped away, tainted by selfishness and competition in the ridiculous march of a vicious circle. Your dignity and hope peek timidly over your gaze, no longer as innocent, no longer as pure as before. Before you, the path no longer forks: there is a single straight line pointing to the exit, visible yet your feet feel heavy and your senses are unresponsive. On the table where you once spent hours with the laptop that you came to regard as an extension of your mind, lies the page you fill by hand with patience, trying to breathe and maintain some semblance of calm.
In some dark office in Villa Marista, all your projects are waiting, potentially facing a quick formatting, an annihilation, a thorough deletion that can only hurt you. But you are just another victim; nothing sets you apart from those before you, perhaps even more humiliated by a more agonizing outrage. Now you just need to rise again and take that path without looking back.
Havana, February 4, 2018.
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