The Cuban actress Yailene Sierra condemned the five-year banishment that the Cuban authorities imposed on the film director Lester Hamlet and he wondered “how far they are going to go”.
Impotence!!!!!!! I roundly condemn the decision not to allow an honest artist, my friend Lester Hamlet Veira Rodríguez, to return to our country. I do not understand or believe that anyone can find any logical justification for this. But how far will they go???? I love you Lester. You will be fine and you will come back. I will not remain silent in the face of such injustice.” the actress wrote in a Facebook post where he included a photo of himself with the filmmaker.
Sierra reacted to the denunciation made by Hamlet on the afternoon of this Wednesday. The film and television director affirmed that the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) sanctioned him to five years without being able to enter the country.
“Banishment of the island. The day before yesterday morning I received a call from the ICAIC Protocol Department to let me know that, because I did not return to the island on time – a time determined by them – a sanction has been applied to me that prevents me from returning to Cuba in the next five years”, exposed the audiovisual producer on his Facebook profile.
He also commented that “my thoughts were confused by the arbitrariness of the so-called sanction, which is actually an announced exile.”
He also assured that he knows that “they do not want at home those of us who have different ideas regarding freedom and homeland. I already know and I have seen it in many imposed absences. I already know, moreover, that they feel they are the owners of your life.”
“From the awareness of being ‘different’ from that project, I accept the gift with honor and I venture to start my life again in another place, at 51 years old, full of new illusions and under the impact of knowing exile in the first place. person,” said the renowned film and television director.
“I just want to thank the opportunity to which they force me, even though it was not a plan in my head, especially because of the affective ties that bind me to that space that now they do not allow me to be part of,” he said.
Hamlet said that “that broken society continues its path towards the most absolute mediocrity. How sad not to be able to be a direct witness of its imminent end. I would have liked to see it, to experience together with my countrymen the joy of knowing that they are free”.
“I can do nothing,” assured the Cuban artist. “It will also be my turn to be far away, with an advanced freedom that falls in love and seduces. We all already know that before, long before five years, all that stupidity that accompanies the dictatorship will have disappeared. I have not the slightest doubt”.
The filmmaker pointed out that “protected by the happiness of being free, and continuing on the side of so many who do represent the truth, I also announce to the world my satisfaction for having been able to do the right thing, film the truth and have committed myself to the end of the history of that sick illusion”.
Finally, he recalled the lines of a poem about exile in which they sang: “Goodbye, happy homeland, beloved Eden…”.
“Now that we leave behind an unhappy homeland and an Eden that only exists in lies, the distance will be my new perspective to continue looking at Cuba. With my truth, I advance. Long live free Cuba! ”, She concluded in his message.
The denunciation made by Hamlet has provoked the general and immediate solidarity of the Cuban intellectual field within the island and in the diaspora, to a point where the Cuban authorities have been forced to pronounce themselves and, it seems, rectify for this time the violation rights to the artist.
“Lester Hamlet can return to Cuba whenever he wishes, it is a constitutional right. Anything else you have been told by the ICAIC Protocol is a mistake. We will rectify it and we will do the corresponding analyses”, Culture Minister Alpidio Alonso wrote in a recent tweet.
Many of the comments on Alonso’s tweet celebrate this rectification in the Hamlet case, while lamenting that this “constitutional right” is violated at the discretion of the regime and used as a weapon of discrimination against artists, critics, dissidents, and activists.
“Yes, the same constitutional right that Celia Cruz had, that not even to bury her mother was she allowed to re-enter her own country. Now go running with Lester, and try to cover up the lyrics, they never expected the tide of support for the artist and repudiation of the dictatorship, “commented a user.