Pod Insights Radiolab Los Frikis About this episode How a group of 80’s Cuban misfits found rock-and-roll and created a revolution within a revolution, going into exile without ever leaving home. Reporter Luis Trelles brings us the story of punk rock’s arrival in Cuba and a small band of outsiders who sentenced themselves to death and set themselves free. We originally released this episode back in 2015 in a collaboration with Radio Ambulante, but the story is so fascinating (and, in many ways, still relevant) that we haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Special thanks to the bands VIH, Eskoria, Metamorfosis and Alio Die & Mariolina Zitta for the use of their music.
Radio Ambulante launches their 15th season on September 30th!!
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Find some of Radio Ambulante’s other stories about the Frikis here:
The Survivors (https://zpr.io/Kh8KWWi6SqaF)
When Havana was Friki (https://zpr.io/HrXsgibzvbJj)
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Transcript 5,345 words · 22 speakers
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0:48 Speaker 01 WNYC supporters include Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
1:13 Speaker 02 I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And today on the show, we have a story from our archives. It's about a group of kids growing up in Cuba in the 90s. And these kids, who had great taste in music, by the way, they decided to do something extreme. They decided to escape the system by any means necessary. We wanted to play it for you now, in part because it's Hispanic Heritage Month, but also because of what's going on in Cuba now. In 2025, Cuba is facing a major economic crisis. There are power outages, food shortages, protests. The government is punishing dissent and public criticism, all of which is similar to the
1:56 Speaker 02 situation that was playing out in the 90s when our story begins and that these kids were directly responding to. So we're going to play you this episode and then we have a quick update for you at the end. So here you are, Lost Freakies. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay.
2:20 Speaker 03 You're listening to Radio Lab.
2:23 Speaker 01 Radio Lab.
2:24 Speaker 03 From...
2:24 Speaker 01 WNYC.
2:32 Speaker 04 Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radio Lab. Robert's traveling today, so it's just me. And today, we have a very different kind of story than we've ever done. It comes from a journalist and filmmaker named Luis Traeus. And an interesting thing kind of happened as we were reporting this.
2:50 Speaker 05 Sounds pretty clear. Yeah. It's gotta be a landline.
2:53 Speaker 04 Luis and one of our producers, Tim Howard, had called up this guy, Vladimir Ceballos, who is a filmmaker himself, Cuban guy, exile. And the interview happened to be just a few hours after Obama had made that big announcement.
3:10 Speaker 06 Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba. In the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.
3:20 Speaker 04 That happened just before the interview.
3:22 Speaker 05 Hello, is this Vladimir? Okay, we're recording.
3:24 Speaker 07 Yes, it's Vladimir.
3:25 Speaker 05 Vladimir, how you doing? This is Tim in New York. And we also have Luis.
3:29 Speaker 08 Hi, Vlad. It's Luis.
3:31 Speaker 07 How are you, Luis?
3:32 Speaker 08 Good, good. And you?
3:33 Speaker 07 About the news, no?
3:34 Speaker 08 Yeah, amazing news, right?
3:35 Speaker 07 Man, I was crying, man.
3:36 Speaker 05 Really?
3:38 Speaker 07 Yeah, I was crying, man. Yeah. First of all, you know, I've been here in the United States for 20 years. And I never, never think that I was gonna see this day, you know?
3:53 Speaker 05 Really?
3:53 Speaker 06 We will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.
3:57 Speaker 07 Because it has been 50 years, 53 years, since the United States, you know, brought the relationship with diplomatic relationship with Cuba.
4:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:08 Speaker 07 And nothing happened in Cuba. You know, everything is the same. Now, everything is gonna change.
4:28 Speaker 04 Today, a collaboration with a fantastic program, Radio Ambulante. Luis Treas comes to us from them. This is a story that predates the stuff you've been hearing in the news. In many ways, it's maybe a tiny, dark preamble to all of that stuff. It's a story about Cuba, the power of music, and a group of Cuban kids who decide to opt out in this crazy way that when Luis Treas told us about it, we almost couldn't believe.
4:58 Speaker 08 So the reason we called up Vlad, is that we wanted to hear the backstory of all of this.
5:03 Speaker 07 Well, I was born in Pinal de Rio in 1964.
5:06 Speaker 05 Tell me about what it was like for you to be a kid.
5:09 Speaker 07 I was happy because in Cuba, we didn't have any information. We didn't have any communication with anybody outside Cuba. And everything that we received, it was the, you know, the news that the government wanted to give us to us.
5:28 Speaker 08 He remembers listening to endless Fidel Castro speeches on the radio.
5:34 Speaker 07 I remember when I was a kid in elementary school, all the time, they were teaching us that Russia was the big country in the war, the big economy, and everything that we would hope is to be like then.
5:51 Speaker 08 It was a given that he would get in line every year to get his toy.
5:56 Speaker 07 You know, I only got three toys every year.
5:58 Speaker 04 Because of rationing?
5:59 Speaker 08 Exactly. And then every week, he and his folks would wake up, they would go to the nearest church.
6:05 Speaker 07 To throw eggs at the church building.
6:08 Speaker 05 Throw eggs at the church?
6:09 Speaker 04 Why?
6:10 Speaker 07 Because we didn't believe in God. The government, they didn't believe in God, you know?
6:13 Speaker 08 That's how you showed you were a good revolutionary, and Vladimir was just being a good boy. But when he turns 14, there comes a day when a friend takes him aside and shows him a video of Led Zeppelin.
6:27 Speaker 07 I remember that day. I remember like-
6:29 Speaker 05 Do you remember what Led Zeppelin song it was?
6:31 Speaker 07 Catch Me.
6:35 Speaker 08 Casimir, oh yeah.
6:36 Speaker 07 Yeah, Casimir. It was my first time that I hear rock and roll music.
6:43 Speaker 08 How did it make you feel when you heard Casimir?
6:46 Speaker 07 Well, different.
6:52 Speaker 07 You know, you see Robert Plant, and you see Jimmy Page with those long hair and the move that they have.
7:02 Speaker 07 And the thing that they say, it was really different. And because of that, you know, I was completely changed.
7:13 Speaker 07 Completely changed my life. Let me tell you, completely changed my life.
7:17 Speaker 08 He's not sure why, but in that moment...
7:21 Speaker 07 I went from a good example to freaky.
7:27 Speaker 07 I went to freaky, I went to freaky.
7:29 Speaker 04 What is freaky?
7:31 Speaker 08 So freakies are what Cubans call the most extreme metalheads, hard rock, punk rockers.
7:38 Speaker 07 We start wearing dirty clothes, clothes with holes, long hair.
7:44 Speaker 08 Problem was?
7:45 Speaker 07 The Cuban radio station didn't put any rock music. And I remember when I was nineteen years or twenty years old, my father gave me a Russian radio, and it was a good FM. We went to the roof of some friends because in those roofs you can listen to the station from Florida.
8:08 Speaker 07 And man, we listen Rolling Stones, Sympathy with the Devil.
8:16 Speaker 07 Hello, baby. Semihiga. Hello, baby. Man, Barry Manilow, we were excited to listen to Barry Manilow. After that, I didn't like it, you know, but in the beginning, everything that came from there in English was good, you know? Because, I don't know, that kind of music give us another, another door.
8:39 Speaker 08 So, Laddie's walking around with ripped jeans, long hair, and that's fine, it's a normal youth rebellion.
8:49 Speaker 08 But then, in the late eighties, everything changes.
8:52 Speaker 09 Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.
9:00 Speaker 09 Mr. Grobichov, tear down this wall.
9:07 Speaker 07 The wall went down.
9:09 Speaker 10 They are here in the thousands, they are here in the tens of thousands.
9:13 Speaker 08 And in reaction,
9:14 Speaker 03 ellos murieron por el socialismo.
9:17 Speaker 08 The Castro government dug in.
9:18 Speaker 03 ellos murieron por el internacionalismo.
9:22 Speaker 07 Fidel says,
9:23 Speaker 03 socialismo?
9:24 Speaker 07 Socialismo?
9:25 Speaker 03 o muerte.
9:26 Speaker 07 Or death.
9:28 Speaker 01 His slogan is painted freshly all over Havana: Socialism or Death.
9:32 Speaker 08 Suddenly, music you listened to became very ideological, and if you listened to rock, you were listening to the enemy of the Cuban state, the United States. The government created a police presence in every neighborhood, every five blocks. And Vladimir says, if the police found you and you had long hair, they'd beat us, kick us. Send you away to work, cutting sugarcane in the cane fields. That's like that, boom. In school, they'd often cut your hair against your will. It was abuse.
10:02 Speaker 04 And just to jump in, this is the point in the story where things take a very, no other way to say it, a very punk rock turn, because into this cultural war, steps a guy named, Papo. Papu.
10:12 Speaker 08 We named him El Papo La Bala.
10:14 Speaker 11 Papo La Bala, you know, Papo the Bullet. I really want to say that he tried to embody that, that kind of bullet to your brain, that wake up.
10:28 Speaker 08 That's Bob Oriano, he's a professor at Southern Oregon University. He went several times in the 90s to Cuba to interview Papu, who he calls the Kurt Cobain of the freakies.
10:39 Speaker 11 Yeah, he looked very intense, he was cocky and confident and just charismatic.
10:45 Speaker 08 Super tall.
10:46 Speaker 04 Skinny?
10:47 Speaker 12 Yeah, he always wear a American flat.
10:51 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, yeah. Like a bandana.
10:53 Speaker 12 He usually,
10:54 Speaker 08 Those are two friends of Papu's, Jesús Díaz and Luis Hernandez, who was also a bandmate of his.
11:00 Speaker 12 Yo recuerdo que una vez, cuando él vino a visitarnos ahí a mi casa ahí donde vivía.
11:05 Speaker 08 So Luis remembers the first time he met Papu, and it was on a night that a Communist Party meeting was taking place right outside his house.
11:17 Speaker 12 Outside the building, and when Papu is coming, he's coming in a bicycle, and we, he's had a flat, United States flat. And when he's coming.
11:30 Speaker 13 On his head?
11:31 Speaker 12 Yeah, my father, my father going down. Él se escondió.
11:37 Speaker 08 Your father hid, your father hid when he saw him coming with the American flag on his head.
11:42 Speaker 12 Mi padre se escondió en el banco y le dijo papo, ¿tú estás loco? ¿Estás loco? Taking your flat out of, out of your head. And papo say, why, why? And everyone outside the building, silence.
12:05 Speaker 13 Papo was, was a weird guy. Soy de aquí esta provincia, Pina del Río, nacido aquí mismo. Hijo, eh, más bien de padre, un mito.
12:15 Speaker 08 You can see video of Papo because Vladimir shot a documentary in 1994 where he interviewed Papo and some of the other freakies. And in that documentary, Papo talks about growing up poor.
12:25 Speaker 07 Father is an alcoholic. Mother abandoned.
12:28 Speaker 13 Da por ellos sea, lo que nosotros le llamamos guerrilla.
12:30 Speaker 08 By age 14, he's in the streets. And a few years later, he makes a decision that's really at the heart of this story.
12:39 Speaker 13 La enfermedad por el rey, porque la policía mantenía su caga.
12:42 Speaker 08 Just to set it up so that you can understand the context.
12:47 Speaker 07 What happened was that in 1989, I think, 1990.
12:52 Speaker 08 Somewhere around there, the Cuban government is fighting in Angola. It's backing a leftist liberation movement and it's kind of a proxy war with the United States. And in the late eighties, Cuban soldiers start coming back home.
13:05 Speaker 07 And some soldiers from the Cuban army that were in Africa, they came with HIV. HIV positive. And because of that, the government has all the people in Cuba tested with HIV.
13:20 Speaker 08 If you belong to a high-risk group, you were tested.
13:23 Speaker 07 They went to the, to your place of war, they went to your apartment, they went to the school, they went to everybody.
13:29 Speaker 08 Wow.
13:29 Speaker 07 I remember they went, they went to my war and they test everybody over there in the radio station. Fifty peoples over there.
13:35 Speaker 08 Wow.
13:36 Speaker 07 Give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood.
13:38 Speaker 08 Vladimir says they would come in, take your blood, and if they found that you were positive.
13:42 Speaker 07 The police came, put you in the, in the police car, and go straight to the sanatorium.
13:47 Speaker 13 They just locked you up?
13:48 Speaker 08 Yeah.
13:49 Speaker 07 And I remember, uh...
13:52 Speaker 07 I remember one day I was talking to him.
13:54 Speaker 08 Papo and his wife?
13:55 Speaker 07 Papo said, "Look." "Al carajo, yo no quiero vivir aquí en este sistema que me está llevando a donde me está llevando, you know? I wanna live free. Look, they're kicking me out, they're beating me out, they don't, they don't want me to live like a rocker here. They are doing a lot of things to me, I'm gonna do a lot of things to them." And he told me, "Look, I went to this rock concert in Villa Clara."
14:20 Speaker 08 Papo told him, "I met up with these other rockers, they were HIV positive, and I went and took a syringe, drew some blood from their arm, and I put the needle in my own arm."
14:31 Speaker 07 And I gave myself with HIV. I gave myself with, with blood, contaminated with, with HIV, you know? And I looked at him and said, "Man, do you know what you did? Do you know what are you doing? You're gonna die, man." And he said to me, "I don't care."
14:50 Speaker 05 That's crazy, though.
14:51 Speaker 07 It was crazy.
14:51 Speaker 05 He, he knew for sure that when he did that, that he, that that was a death sentence?
14:57 Speaker 07 For him, yes. He knows.
15:00 Speaker 08 Vladimir is not quite sure that the others that came after Papo really knew what they were doing, but, but Papo knew.
15:08 Speaker 07 Remember, he says, "Socialismo, o muerte." Of death. And Papo said to me, "Death is a door.
15:19 Speaker 07 When you don't have any more doors to open, death is a door."
15:25 Speaker 04 Coming up, that door gets wider, others walk through. And for at least a beat, they find something besides death, something quite the opposite.
15:42 Speaker 14 This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I live far from my family. Every year at Thanksgiving, I get the same question, "Where am I going for the holiday?" After years of getting caught at airports, or spending tons of money, or getting the seasonal flu, my answer, "Nowhere." I have finally said, "No more to travel at Thanksgiving." But it did take a lot of guts to call it off, because when it comes to the holidays, there are all these expectations of how to celebrate, where to celebrate, and who with. Going against the grain can be hard. Therapy can help. BetterHelp says it has therapists that are licensed, experienced professionals, bringing at least three years and over 1,000 hours of hands-on experience to people.
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17:47 Speaker 15 This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?
17:52 Speaker 16 Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.
18:03 Speaker 15 Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
18:17 Speaker 04 Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.
18:19 Speaker 08 Yes, 1-2-1-2, mic check.
18:22 Speaker 04 That's Luis Treus of Radio Ambulante. Let's go back to his story about Cuba and music in the late 80s and 90s. And so far, a dude has made a crazy decision, dude named Papo, to inject himself with HIV. Would you call it a protest?
18:35 Speaker 08 I think Papo would have called it a protest, but not the guys that came after.
18:41 Speaker 04 This is at a moment when there was a cultural war happening between the Castro government and anyone it deemed antisocial, which included kids with long hair who listened to rock. And it was also a moment where if you were found to be HIV positive in Cuba, you were forcibly quarantined.
18:57 Speaker 08 So Papo injects himself and he gets sent to the sanitarium.
19:01 Speaker 04 And can you describe that place? Like, what did he find?
19:04 Speaker 08 Well, he found a beautiful place in the middle of the Pina del Rio countryside.
19:09 Speaker 04 Really?
19:10 Speaker 08 It's full of palm trees, very green, very lush, farm animals roaming in.
19:18 Speaker 04 Huh, and you went there?
19:19 Speaker 08 Yes, yes, I was there. I was there, and there are still farm animals over there. Actually, they would roam in as a couple of cows and chickens. It's like, kind of an idyllic place. So I went there to visit the last two rockers that still remain in the place, Gerson Govea and his wife, Yovanda. And they're kind of like the keepers of all that went down in there, the memories. So I spent a couple of days with them, and they walked me around. And it's full of like these little housing units.
19:55 Speaker 04 And you're saying this place was idyllic even back then?
19:57 Speaker 08 Yeah. Gerson and Yovanda are walking me through it, and they're like, "Okay, so we would be walking around here 10 years ago, and Nirvana would be coming out of here."
20:07 Speaker 17 Ay, ay, de todo. Nirvana.
20:12 Speaker 07 Tengo Metallica.
20:14 Speaker 08 Metallica would be coming out of the next house.
20:18 Speaker 07 Cidinc, Sepelín.
20:21 Speaker 04 No kidding?
20:22 Speaker 08 Yeah, so it was like a head banger's ball in Pinar del Rio, you know?
20:26 Speaker 04 Wait, but why? I mean, how come they were able to have that freedom in the sanatorium, but not outside?
20:31 Speaker 08 Initially, the sanitarium system was under the military, and it was more of a gulag. But in the late 80s, early 90s, the sanitariums went from the military being in charge to the Ministry of Health and Medicine.
20:49 Speaker 04 Huh.
20:50 Speaker 08 And these were, by all accounts, very progressive doctors, very concerned about their patients. They gave them all the food and medicine they needed. And they were like, "You wanna rock out? Go ahead."
21:02 Speaker 04 So it was like a prison, but it was also kind of a little bubble of freedom?
21:06 Speaker 08 Yeah. And strangely enough, they soon found out that they even had power.
21:12 Speaker 07 No, no police over there.
21:13 Speaker 08 A power they didn't have before. Vladdy told me this story. The patients in said the sanitarium could go out every 21 days for a day trip. And some of the freakies would go out, and just by flashing their ID cards that said they were AIDS patients, police would leave them alone.
21:30 Speaker 07 I remember in two or three occasions that the police came after them, and one of them has a syringe.
21:38 Speaker 04 A syringe?
21:39 Speaker 07 A syringe, full of blood.
21:41 Speaker 08 And Vladdy says the guy took out the blood and waved it at the police.
21:46 Speaker 07 And said, "You wanna come to me? Come here. Come to me." And they were afraid of that.
21:54 Speaker 08 And so word began to spread about what life was like inside the sanitarium. And you have to keep in mind that outside...
22:03 Speaker 08 Cuba was falling apart.
22:04 Speaker 18 Hard economic times in Cuba. The government today tightened bread rationing and raised egg prices. It blamed delays in Soviet shipments to Cuba.
22:11 Speaker 08 Almost overnight, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was left without the massive subsidies it used to get. That meant...
22:20 Speaker 18 Long lines for bread.
22:23 Speaker 18 Short tempers.
22:24 Speaker 07 We were suffering.
22:26 Speaker 08 Vladimir Savalos, who never actually lived inside the sanitarium, he says that people outside were going hungry. And he himself...
22:33 Speaker 07 I was weighing like 100 pounds, 98 pounds.
22:36 Speaker 08 Oh my god. And as things just kept getting worse...
22:40 Speaker 07 You see, like a...
22:40 Speaker 18 Hungry, sunburned, dehydrated.
22:42 Speaker 07 50,000 people leave Cuba.
22:44 Speaker 18 They managed to escape on a raft and make it to the Florida Keys. These days, more Cubans than ever are taking the risk.
22:51 Speaker 07 It was the big crisis, you know, in the Clinton era. But...
22:55 Speaker 08 If you were in the sanatorium, you were fine. Yeah, just being able to get milk and an egg and beans. Bob Ariano says that that was a big motivation for a lot of kids. Yes, I'm not going to be harassed. Yes, I'm free. And yes, I also get meals. And it went from being a couple of self-injectors, a couple of dozen self-injectors, to being hundreds. Wow. And did the government know that this was happening? Well...
23:28 Speaker 08 There's this Swedish documentary from the time. It's called "Socialismo Muerte", and in it, there's this bishop of Havana.
23:39 Speaker 08 His last name is Cespedes. And he says that he met some of the kids that were injecting themselves with AIDS. And that at a state dinner, he approached Fidel. He told him...
23:53 Speaker 08 These kids, they're injecting themselves. And Fidel... Couldn't believe it.
24:03 Speaker 07 And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell syringe anymore. They put a law that if you're injecting yourself with HIV, you're going to spend eight years in prison. But...
24:17 Speaker 08 It didn't matter.
24:18 Speaker 07 It was like a movement.
24:22 Speaker 07 It was like a moon.
24:25 Speaker 08 And all of a sudden, you have all these bands forming across the island in different sanitariums. In the biggest one of them all, in Santiago de la Vega, Los Cocos, which is like a half hour, forty-five minutes south of Havana, you have the first group that gets formed. It's called VIH, which translates to HIV.
24:49 Speaker 08 But then in the center of the island, in this town called Santa Clara, you had the Cuban punk band, Escoria, and Escoria translates as...
24:57 Speaker 11 Scum, right? Escoria.
25:00 Speaker 08 And according to Bob, if you look back to the eighties, the people who were fleeing Cuba...
25:04 Speaker 11 The balceros, the rafters. One of the responses of the Cuban government were billboards that said, "Que vaya la Escoria", "Que se vayan", "Let the scum leave." So to call yourself Escoria, to call yourself scum...
25:17 Speaker 08 That...
25:18 Speaker 11 Is punk rock.
25:23 Speaker 04 And were these bands big outside the sanatorium too?
25:26 Speaker 08 Escoria is, I mean, you can't talk about Cuban punk without, I mean, Escoria is like...
25:31 Speaker 04 So their tapes got out or something?
25:33 Speaker 08 Yeah, totally.
25:34 Speaker 04 And what happens next? I mean, these bands are forming, kids are self-injecting, does it just keep growing and growing?
25:38 Speaker 08 Yeah.
25:42 Speaker 08 There's tape of, uh, Herson and Yolanda saying that it got to be so fashionable that kids started to think that in order to be a freaky, you had to have AIDS.
25:54 Speaker 04 Really?
25:54 Speaker 08 Yeah, no, there was tape of Yolanda saying...
26:03 Speaker 08 Which is, and the kids were saying that if you really wanted to be a rocker in that time, you had to have AIDS.
26:08 Speaker 11 It's like, the fact that it went from ten or twenty to two hundred or more was obviously like this kind of just, um, joiner phenomenon of like, "That's so cool, I'm gonna do it too."
26:25 Speaker 11 There was even talk among some of the young people I met of thinking that, "Oh, eventually, Fidel and those guys will find a cure."
26:31 Speaker 07 They're gonna find a cure for this.
26:33 Speaker 11 Cuba with the best, one of the best healthcare systems in the western hemisphere...
26:37 Speaker 07 We're gonna live forever.
26:40 Speaker 07 But everything start to change when the first of them die.
26:47 Speaker 08 According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinal de Rio was a guy named Manuel. We don't know his last name or his age.
26:54 Speaker 07 He was the first. And when the second died, and when the third died, everything stopped.
27:01 Speaker 08 At one point in Vladi's documentary, which was made in 1994, Papo says that in two years,
27:09 Speaker 08 about eighteen people died.
27:12 Speaker 07 And they start seeing how you die. Because you don't die like a normal person who had a heart attack or anything. No, you transform yourself.
27:21 Speaker 08 A lot of them went blind, then they went insane. They started getting opportunistic diseases, you know how AIDS works.
27:29 Speaker 07 Seeing that, they start thinking about what they did.
27:34 Speaker 08 Did kids start saying they wish they hadn't done this? Well, when you see Vladi's documentary and that Swedish documentary, Socialismo en el Mundo, which was made in 1995, you definitely see the kids having deep regrets. You have one of them saying,
27:52 Speaker 08 "I regret this." "I regret it a million times."
27:59 Speaker 08 How about Papo?
28:01 Speaker 11 Well, I don't, I never heard Papo ever question that he had done it.
28:10 Speaker 08 And in that Swedish documentary, there's a scene towards the end where you see Papo and he's clearly sick. He's real thin, his face is swollen.
28:20 Speaker 08 And we see him stepping into an evangelical church.
28:27 Speaker 08 He's wearing an Orana t-shirt, but he's become a fervent Christian. He's found this community of evangelical Christians that accepts AIDS patients. And he's still taunting the government because he says,
28:45 Speaker 08 He's still a rocker and that he thinks that Christ is the perfect communist. If more communists were like the Christians, that would be perfect. It's interesting though, because in that last video, we also see him taking English classes.
28:59 Speaker 13 Money. Away. How fine. And you?
29:03 Speaker 08 And he's saying like, you know,
29:05 Speaker 13 Yo me olvido de que soy enfermo.
29:07 Speaker 08 The other patients in the sanitarium, they're like sick like me.
29:10 Speaker 13 No quieren pasar el trabajo.
29:11 Speaker 08 They won't go out at night.
29:13 Speaker 13 No quieren dejar una noche sin comer.
29:14 Speaker 08 They won't rock out till the early morning. But I'm like,
29:18 Speaker 13 Entiende, pero yo no.
29:19 Speaker 08 This is my life.
29:22 Speaker 04 So he was sort of defiant at the end?
29:24 Speaker 08 Yeah.
29:24 Speaker 19 Sí, él echaba sangre cuando murió por los oídos, por la nariz, por la boca.
29:30 Speaker 08 And a few months later, according to Kirsten, Papo started to bleed out from his mouth.
29:36 Speaker 19 Y perdió la mente, delirando.
29:38 Speaker 08 And eyes.
29:39 Speaker 19 Porque era un parásito comiéndole el cerebro.
29:41 Speaker 08 He had a parasite in his brain. He became violent. And he died from that disease.
29:50 Speaker 19 Entonces como ni conocía y al final...
29:54 Speaker 04 God, part of me wonders like, is this strong and fierce? Or is it just dumb and sad? And maybe fierce also? Like, I can't figure out how to feel about this.
30:03 Speaker 08 Yeah, well, I think it can be all those things, right? It was dumb and stupid and immature. And it was also nihilistic and anarchic.
30:12 Speaker 04 And do you think in the end it had any impact?
30:15 Speaker 08 Well, that's hard to say. It must have. It must have.
30:26 Speaker 04 Here's how Luis puts it. Not even five years after Papo died, things did start to shift in Cuba. Make of it what you will, but December 8th, 2000, Castro unveils the statue of John Lennon.
30:43 Speaker 04 That same year,
30:47 Speaker 04 Bob Ariano and a bunch of rock musicians.
30:49 Speaker 11 Including Will Oldham, David Pahoe.
30:51 Speaker 04 They're given permission to play a bunch of rock shows in Cuba, out in the open. And at one of those shows in Pinar del Rio,
30:59 Speaker 11 announced, listen, we're going to send out this next number to Papo Labala and the Freakies.
31:21 Speaker 11 And everyone sang along.
31:25 Speaker 04 Now, it would be impossible to draw any kind of cause and effect and say one thing led to another, that would be ridiculous, but Luis says that back when the freakies were streaming into the sanatorium-
31:36 Speaker 08 Cuba wasn't changing back then. It started to change precisely because of 100 gestures, big and small.
31:44 Speaker 04 He says around Cuba at that moment, there are all of these tiny, mostly silent protests taking hold.
31:50 Speaker 08 And then you have the Maleconazo, which was like the first serious civil disobedience that Castro had in 94, where just a mob in Havana rose up because they were so tired of the power outages, they were angry at their poor living conditions, they were leaving the city in rafts by the thousands, by the hundreds. Castro literally had to come down to the QAnmaicon, the beautiful seaside road that circles around Havana, and he literally had to talk the mob down.
32:22 Speaker 04 So at this moment, you know, late 80s, early 90s-
32:25 Speaker 08 There's this breeding ground of discontent all over Cuba, and I think the self-injector movement is the best crystallization we have of that.
32:38 Speaker 04 It's like this sort of 1,000 points of light, and this is the brightest point-
32:41 Speaker 08 Right.
32:41 Speaker 04 Or the darkest point, frankly.
32:43 Speaker 08 Right, exactly.
33:32 Speaker 02 Okay, so it's Latif here again. Now, the reporter who reported this story back in 2015, Luis Trajes, has an update for you from now, 2025. So here it is.
33:45 Speaker 08 Since this story first ran, Bob Ariano has continued traveling to Cuba to work with Vladimir Sabayos on a documentary about the self-injector movement and the Cuban rock scene. I've stayed in touch with Gerson. He's the self-injected punk rocker I visited in the abandoned sanatorium. He's still living there, along with his partner, Yohanda. He tells me that with Cuba's deep political and economic crisis, it's hard to be in a punk band. His town has 18-hour blackouts, and even plugging in a guitar is tough. But Gerson says he still thinks about Pablo Abala. He says that in today's Cuba, Pablo would be doing the same thing he did when he was alive. He would be finding a way to stay true to himself and keeping it metal.
34:35 Speaker 02 Huge thank you to Luis. He now works as senior editor on the Embedded podcast. That's NPR's home for deeply reported narrative series. And thank you to Radio Ambulante. We were so excited to collaborate with them back in 2015. And thank you to Daniel Alarcón for making that collaboration possible. Radio Ambulante's new season, which is its 15th season, launches on September 30. If you don't know them, check it out, radioambulante.org. They tell these incredible stories from around the Spanish-speaking world in Spanish. Back in 2015, they also created a Spanish version, a Spanish-language version of this story, which goes kind of in a different direction. It goes way more in-depth into
35:18 Speaker 02 Luis's visit to Cuba and the story of Gerson and Yohanda, the last two remaining self-infected freakies. Thank you to Vladimir Sabayos and Bob Ariano for the use of their documentaries, and to Ali O'Dai and the Cuban punk bands HIV and Escoria for their original music in this episode. I'm Latif Nasr. Thank you for listening.
35:40 Speaker 20 Hi, I'm Marcella and I'm from Kitzaldenango, Guatemala. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Dad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu, Niamha Sambandhan, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Meeson, Sarah Carey, Tara Sandberg, Anisa Vitz, Arien Whack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand.
36:23 Speaker 20 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Ana Pujol Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.
36:37 Speaker 21 Hi, this is Les calling from Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simon Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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