Angel Santiesteban and the Path of the Fugitive

Angel Santiesteban and the Path of the Fugitive
Posted on August 8, 2014
By Armando Añel, July 30, 2014

The confused news that comes from Havana indicates that either Angel
Santiesteban ran away from the prison-settlement where he was unjustly
imprisoned or the political police have launched a fabrication to
condemn him to a longer term of imprisonment and keep him isolated.

In any case, we must wait for specific statements from the novelist and
blogger. Today we know that his children saw him in prison but they
couldn't speak freely with him: a member of State Security was with them
the whole minuscule time they were with their father.

I don't believe it, but if Santiesteban effectively took the decision to
flee — in spite of the fact that, as his sister Maria de los Angeles
Santiesteban said, at another time he could have remained in the
exterior without major inconvenience and he didn't do so — I
congratulate him.

Begging pardon from friends and colleagues who disagree, one never
should surrender to a delinquent regime. In Cuba no procedural guarantee
exists, and we all know the degree of superlative helplessness that the
citizenry suffers. A product that the Castro regime has exported to
countries like Venezuela, where the case of Leopoldo Lopez shows that
these gestures of chivalry are counterproductive in societies hijacked
by the State.

I chatted with Idabell Rosales for a moment. Santiesteban never should
go into prison voluntarily. Not only because of the rigged trial that he
suffered previously and that made his sentence absolutely unjust, but
also because in countries like Cuba all the gear of social coexistence,
of daily structure, is flawed in advance and twists the logic of
personal relations.

During these last months, in the face of the campaign for his freedom,
he saw with clarity the degree of vilification by the Cuban intellectual
class not only on the Island or among the pro-Castro creators, but also
in the exterior and in a part of the media-oriented dissidence that he
says "laments" his detention but travels half the world without
advocating for his freedom.

To live in Cuba is to surrender to a darkly surrealist reality, and to
yield to the jailers of the country as he did in 2013, seemed to me and
seems to me to be doubly absurd. Fugitives don't hand themselves over.
But I respect, scrupulously, the author of The Summer God Slept and
those who defend that type of attitude, brave like very few. It appears
that God continues to sleep. Although, as Carlos Alberto Montaner said,
we also know that He will wake up.

Published in NeoClub Press.

Source: Angel Santiesteban and the Path of the Fugitive | Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/angel-santiesteban-and-the-path-of-the-fugitive/