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

So to call yourself Escoria, to call yourself scum... That... Is...

Punk rock.

And were these bands big outside the sanatorium too?

Escoria is, I mean, you can't talk about Cuban punk without, I mean, Escoria is like... So their tapes got out or something?

Yeah, totally.

And what happens next?

I mean, these bands are forming, kids are self-injecting.

Does it just keep growing and growing?

Yeah.

There's tape of Herson and Yohandra 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.

Which is, and the kids were saying that if you really wanted to be a rocker in that time, you had to have AIDS.

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.

But everything started to change when the first of them died.

According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinar del Rio was a guy named Manuel.

We don't know his last name or his age.

He was the first.

And when the second died, and when the third died, everything stopped.

At one point in Vladi's documentary, which was made in 1994, Papo says that in two years, about 18 people died.

And they start seeing how you die, because you don't die like a...

A normal person when they had a heart attack or anything.