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

That same year.

Bob Mariano and a bunch of rock musicians.

Including Will Oldham, David Pajo.

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.

I announced, listen, we're going to send out this next number to Papo La Bala and the Freakies.

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... Cuba wasn't changing back then.

It started to change precisely because of a hundred gestures, big and small.

He says around Cuba at that moment, there are all of these tiny, mostly silent protests taking hold.

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 Cuban Malecon, the beautiful seaside road that circles around Havana.

And he literally had to talk the mob down.

So at this moment,

you know late 80s early 90s 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 yeah it's like this sort of a thousand points of light and this is the brightest point right or the darkest point frankly right exactly

Since this story first ran, Bob Arellano has continued traveling to Cuba to work with Latimer Ceballos on a documentary about the self-injector movement and the Cuban rock scene.

I've stayed in touch with Gerson.