Jorge Dalton, a Salvadoran filmmaker and son of the renowned poet Roque Dalton, spoke in an interview with CiberCuba about the tragedy that marked his life: the assassination of his father in 1975 at the hands of the very leftist guerrilla organization to which he belonged, and the disillusionment he experienced, having been raised in Cuba, from the moment he began working within the Cuban cultural apparatus.
In response to journalist Tania Costa's question about how he dealt with the family tragedy and whether the Dalton surname weighs heavily on him, the documentarian of "En un rincón del alma" described with starkness what happened to his father.
"My father was murdered by the same leftist organization he was part of, and it was because of that, because my father questioned the dogmas of the left."
According to reports, Roque Dalton tried to initiate an internal ideological debate within the People's Revolutionary Army, something that his comrades did not tolerate. They accused him of being a collaborator with the enemy and a CIA agent —the same accusations that, notes Jorge Dalton, are repeated against anyone who thinks differently in Cuba— and sentenced him to death.
"They sentenced him to death, murdered him in a safe house, and disappeared his body."
The pain did not end there. Jorge Dalton claims that during the ten years of leftist governments in El Salvador, there was also an attempt to erase his father's memory. "They tried to humiliate my father, to belittle him, to bury him every day, and to make him disappear even more. They were scoundrels and they were wretches."
Today, however, El Salvador is reclaiming the legacy of Roque Dalton. On May 14, the largest exhibition dedicated to Roque Dalton ever held in the country will be inaugurated at the National Library, something that, as emphasized, "could never be done during the 10 leftist governments."
In response to the question of what he thinks his father would have thought about the repressive turn in Díaz-Canel's Cuba, Jorge Dalton also drew a parallel between his father and José Martí: both died in May, both were ridiculed by the leaders of their causes, and both were, above all, poets. "Poets, dear friend, poets do not survive on the battlefields. I believe that is a truth as poignant as a theme."
"I started to face censorship."
Regarding his own relationship with Cuba, the filmmaker —who grew up on the island and began his career at the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television— describes a gradual process of disillusionment. As a child, he would applaud Fidel Castro when his parents took him to the square. But everything changed when he started working as a professional.
"I started to confront censorship, I began to face what many intellectuals had faced, and I began to see that there were indeed things I was completely wrong about and completely blinded to," he recalls.
That direct experience with the regime's cultural apparatus was the turning point. "It wasn't until I started working that I realized the country was in very bad shape and that it was on a path with no turning back. And that's where we have arrived now."
Jorge Dalton, whose documentary "In a Corner of the Soul" addresses more than fifty years of the Cuban Revolution through the personal history of the late writer Eliseo Alberto Diego, asserts that his family and many friends share the same disillusionment, "despite the support we had at one time and our belief in the revolution and all of that."
The filmmaker goes further and describes the Cuban regime as "a leftist military regime that governs and violates the most fundamental human rights," demanding that "the State Security apparatus must disappear from the face of Cuba."
The poetry of Roque Dalton remains alive in Cuba and across Latin America, but his son warns that the same pattern that killed him—the power that does not tolerate internal questioning—is the one that governs the island today.
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