“It is there, where I begin to move within the dissidence and the opposition to the Cuban dictatorship. With greater visibility, in which I was arrested many times, beaten, threatened with death, and above all by the "Black Berets" [Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), a shock squad], beaten, staying in a cell for hours or somewhere, where they were interrogating me, threatening me. Where once they promised me that, if I didn't go to Havana to do a program against the state to ask for the release of the writer Ángel Santiesteban [opposer to the communist regime and former political prisoner, well-known writer], they would give me a house in Santa Clara, which I refused. And of course, I went like Rafael Alcide [Rafael Alcide Pérez, radio producer, director and writer] to ask for the freedom of Ángel Santiesteban, who apart from being my brother, my friend, is one of the great Cuban writers, besides what happened an unjust prison.”
“I begin to live with the writers from Las Tunas, and with the writers from Bayamo, and listen to the thoughts of S. Fórmenta [Cuban dissident], to listen to the thoughts of Guillermo Vidal [Cuban dissident, considered a renovator of the Cuban narrative of the 80s of the 20th century] who had thrown him out of the university for thinking the way he did. You start hanging out with writers of your generation, you start listening to other speeches, but you've already been through college, even though you haven't graduated, you've also been through the army, and you start hearing conversations in the army from people who have military degrees that you think like you, but that they have to live on something, and those salaries, or things, that the Government may provide them for holding positions. You keep moving, you keep moving and you begin to join all these tiles like a puzzle. You move to Holguín and start interacting with a writer like Luis Felipe Rojas [a Cuban journalist now based in Miami; fiction and poetry writer], like Michael Hernández Miranda [a Cuban writer who currently lives in the US in Miami].”
“The National Government, or the Ministry of Culture, takes and somehow sponsors the two or three most talented young people from each region, from each province. He is putting together personalities, these are the ones who are promoted, the ones who win the contests, they are the ones who publish, they are the ones who are interviewed, they are the ones who shine. I don't know if they are aware that this is happening, or if this is being done behind their back. There are many names I could mention, but I'm not going to. I'm not going to attack the guild I once belonged to, and many consider me to be on their side. That is, the Cuban writers, I am not going to attack any of them or the artists. For me, these have their merits, they have earned their place and each one is responsible for the attitude they take towards society, towards what is happening, towards the communist regime, towards what the Cuban dictatorship is doing with the people and with the artists, the artists who declare ourselves independent artists, free artists, activists or whatever you want to call them. I could mention a lot of movement of independent artists who are either dissidents or opponents, because they are seeing the reality of Cuba.”
“At an age when the child needs his parents more than ever, because he is changing his way of thinking, his way of being. They admitted me to a scholarship, that the first year was a hilarious year, because we were all innocent. But in eighth, in ninth grade it was chaos. They closed about four schools in the province of Las Tunas, which was where I studied. Jesús Menendéz, La Bomba and La Resbalosa [municipalities in the province of Las Tunas], and all those boys went to my school, because it had the capacity because it had previously been a military unit. It had many accommodation facilities. And those boys were bandoleros, it was like being in a prison. A prison for minors, a concentration camp for minors. In fact, that's how I saw it and that's how I reflected it in my first novel ‘Ángeles desamparados’. It was such an enormous sadness that I came home when it was time for my pass and I cried, because my mother took me out of that high school, but there was no place to go and I had to spend those three years in prison there, you can't call something else.”
Rafael Vilches Proenza is a writer, poet and opponent of the communist regime in Cuba. He was born in 1965 on his grandfather’s farm in the province of Granma, Republic of Cuba, however, the Government of Fidel Castro forced his family and the entire town of Sierra Maestra to move, to avoid a potential peasant uprising. During his high school Rafael attended the semi-boarding school, where he lived an experience of violent separation of the adolescents from his parents, which he described in his first novel “Forsaken Angels”, published in 2001 in Miami. When Rafael was 20 years old, he was sent to the province of Guantánamo for compulsory military service. Upon returning from the army he began his studies in Artistic Education, he is also a graduate of the “Onelio Jorge Cardoso Literary Training Center”. At the end of the 1990s, he began to attend various literary workshops and joined official literature institutions. Over time he got closer to independent writers, intellectuals and artists, for which he was expelled from the institutions of the Cuban government. Because of his criticism of the communist regime, he is the object of constant threats, persecution, kidnapping or surveillance. Rafael has three blood children and one from his current partner, however, he is not allowed to work and his family faces a difficult economic situation. They have a large sum of books published abroad, in 2020 he won the “Reinaldo Arenas Narrative Award” with his book “Save me if you can”. Rafael dreams of living in free Cuba, as a poet, not as a terrorist.
