NATION/WORLD UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, January 18, 1995
9A
AIDS protest story to be shown in film
Documentary to focus on Cubans who injected themselves with HIV
The Associated Press
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Desperate to bring attention to a government that wouldn't even let them listen to rock music, a band of young Cubans plunged needles filled with HIV into their bodies during the 1980s.
Many of the "roqueros," or rockers, are now dead of AIDS. But filmmaker Vladimir Cebalos, who once considered injecting himself, wants to tell their stories.
Ceballos was granted asylum in the United States last year and is working on a documentary at Brown University titled, "Cursed Be Your Name, Liberty." It contains interviews with eight rockers, two of who have died from AIDS.
"Those who chose to die saw no other exit," said Ceballos, 29, who was a rocker in Pinar del Río, about 60 miles east of Havana.
Officials at the Cuban diplomatic mission in Washington did not return telephone messages for comment on the rockers and their actions.
Rockers first appeared in Havana and Pinar Del Rio around 1982. They listened to hard rock and dressed like the long-haired musicians they saw on album covers. Such actions quickly brought beatings, fines and imprisonment.
Ceballos estimated that 100 rockers injected themselves with HIV since 1988. Many did it to make a political statement about conditions in Cuba, while also avoiding persecution, he said.
The country puts those with HIV and AIDS in sanitariums, where they are allowed to dress as they wish, are given good food, are provided air conditioning and television and are allowed to discuss issues — like AIDS —
that are forbidden elsewhere.
They also may skip compulsory military service and put off entering the work force, he said.
These cases of self-injection usually are not included in Cuba's statistics on AIDS, said Diana Martinez, an American who worked with AIDS patients during her fourth year of medical school.
She treated one woman who contracted AIDS in order to be with her rocker boyfriend, Martinez said in a story published late last year in the New York Times Magazine.
Ceballos, the son of prominent Cuban militants, was a rocker who had thought about injecting himself. Instead, he became interested in filmmaking and decided to tell the rockers' stories.
But when he presented his idea for the documentary to his professors, they told him he would be expelled if he made it.
Along came Bobby Rabyd, the pen name of an adjunct lecturer at Brown's Center for Modern Culture and Media. He met Ceballos during a visit to the University of Havana in 1993 and invited him to a conference at Brown.
There, Ceballos and Carlos Zequeira, who was helping him secretly film the documentary, read from a manuscript about the rockers who had injected themselves with HIV. Both decided that night to ask for political asylum, and Zequeira has since moved to Miami.
Rabyd traveled to Cuba after Ceballos requested asylum and secretly finished filming the documentary.
He said there was no formal ceremony for the injection, called "la voia," or "the oath."
"The impression I had is the rockers are very well-educated and very articulate." Rabyd said. "They don't cut the appearance of what we might think as being some fool-hardy youth group that did some childish and absurd act. In fact, they understand the political implications of what they've done."
Immigration key issue in Cuban talks
WASHINGTON — As the United States and Cuba prepare for immigration talks, newly empowered congressional Republicans are seeking to tighten the U.S. embargo against the island.
The Associated Press
U. S. and Cuban officials will meet today in New York for the third in a series of talks on immigration issues. The talks have helped stabilize the immigration situation, which reached crisis proportions last summer when Cubans fled in droves aboard makeshift vessels.
The ability of the two sides to work out an agreement with a minimum of acrimony prompted speculation about a thaw in relations, but that possibility was clouded by the Republican congressional victories in November.
While existing sanctions against Cuba are more severe than any measures adopted against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, influential enemies of the Cuban revolution want to tighten the noose further.
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., a nephew of President Fidel Castro's former wife, has introduced legislation to head off Cuba's admission to international financial institutions and to bar the U.S. purchase of sugar from countries that buy sugar from Cuba.
Diaz-Balart also wants to prohibit the U.S. admission of executives of any foreign company that invests in or purchases U.S. properties confiscated in Cuba.
At the start of the revolution, Cuba seized without compensation about $1.8 billion worth of U.S. properties. The assets are now estimated to be worth $5 billion to $6 billion, taking interest and inflation into account.
Cuba has had some success in luring foreign investors. Mexican and Canadian companies reportedly are eyeing properties confiscated from Americans.
Exile leaders such as Jorge Mas Canosa of Miami say foreign investors are prolonging the life of the communist regime. He has warned foreign governments that such collaboration will incur costs once the revolution is forced to surrender power.
The Clinton administration has not taken a stand on the various proposals to tighten sanctions. In the past, however, the administration has tried to accommodate the anti-Castro forces, mindful of their economic and political clout.
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