Roberto Lopez Rodriguez, a former Cuban political prisoner and musician who had been living in Spain for 13 years, many of them in a condition of helplessness, died last Sunday at the age of 63 in a hospital in Cádiz, in Andalusia.
López Rodríguez, who was one of the 115 Cuban political prisoners who in 2011 accepted the proposal to move to Spain in exchange for his release, died on May 5 from complications of a foot injury that ended in gangrene and amputation.
Trained as a refrigeration engineer in Cuba, Roberto López also studied music and performed with the new Cuban trova.
The president of the Association of Homeless People with Rights (PESHO-DE), Mila Fernández Bey, who knew him very well, explained that in Cuba López Rodríguez played with Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez and that he even recorded with them.
However, in the seventies of the last century Roberto López changed musical instruments for weapons to participate in the war in Angola.
Upon his return, in 1982, he joined the opposition in Cuba. He was arrested, accused of being anti-Castro, and spent ten years in the same prison where Orlando Zapata would die during a hunger strike.
On April 8, 2011, accompanied by a strong deployment of police and authorities, Roberto and another hundred political prisoners arrived at the Barajas airport, assisted by the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and under international protection status.
He and other exiles would later complain that Zapatero failed to fulfill his promise to give them shelter and financial aid.
“I came to Spain because I was given subsidiary protection and international protection. We were guaranteed housing and money for four years. But I never received anything.", he explained to the press.
Roberto said that he had gone to different organizations and never got a response to his complaints.
The Cuban musician lived in several cities, from Madrid to Santiago Compostela, passing through Puente Genil or Huelva. Finally he arrived in Cádiz and for a time managed to earn a living teaching music.
Roberto - who was a percussionist and music teacher - in Spain experienced a succession of disappointments, health problems and, above all, he felt forgotten, unprotected.
During his years in the Iberian nation he contracted pneumonia in both lungs that left him with serious consequences. Then a fall hurt his hip. He would also have problems with his leg that now ended his life.
His struggle with alcoholism complicated his personal relationships, as those close to him admit.
“A professional musician, he was left in a state of absolute precariousness. He suffered from alcoholism and had tried on several occasions to end the addiction. Social Services must be aware that these types of cases require follow-up, an illness cannot be used to expel them to the streets," he lamented in statements to the Cádiz press Miki Carrera, spokesperson for the association Nobody Homeless, which has called a tribute event in front of the doors of the City Hall in honor of the deceased Cuban.
“I found him many times in the Plaza de las Flores, shrunken, on a bench and lately he had been sleeping in a van in Puntales because Social Services gave him up for lost, and that cannot be done,” he added.
The association of homeless people in Cádiz chaired by Mila Fernández has been accompanying the Cuban exile in the last year, trying to guide him.
Fernández Bey remembers Roberto López's years teaching at the Conservatory of Music, remembers how it was difficult for him to give up alcohol, how he became degraded and sometimes became aggressive.
“The decline could be seen coming, his deterioration as a person was a visible reality,” he lamented. Explain what To survive, he sold his instruments one by one and ended up living on the street.
This was how the association Homeless People With Rights He found Roberto. They got him a van that served as his home in a vacant lot in Cádiz. Inside he had a cot to sleep on and his few belongings, but for him it was a palace.
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