Jad Abumrad / Chad (Radiolab host; primarily Jad Abumrad)

Wow.

And did the government know that this was happening?

Well, there's this Swedish documentary from the time, it's called Socialismo Muerte, and in it there's this bishop of Havana...

His last name is Céspedes, 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...

These kids, they're injecting themselves, and Fidel... Couldn't believe it.

And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell syringe anymore.

They put a law that if you inject and sell with HIV, you're going to spend eight years in prison.

But... It didn't matter.

It was like a movement.

It was like a movement.

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, 45 minutes south of Havana, you have the first group that gets formed.

It's called VIH, which translates to HIV.

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... Scum, right?

Escoria.

And according to Bob, if you look back to the 80s, the people who were fleeing Cuba... The balseros, 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.