Mar 24, 2015

Los Frikis

How a group of 80’s Cuban misfits found rock-and-roll and created a revolution within a revolution, going into exile without ever leaving home. In a collaboration with Radio Ambulante, reporter Luis Trelles bring us the story of punk rock’s arrival in Cuba and a small band of outsiders who sentenced themselves to death and set themselves free.

Produced by Tim Howard & Matt Kielty. With production help from Andy Mills. 

Special thanks to VIH, Eskoria, Metamorfosis and Alio Die & Mariolina Zitta for the use of their music. 

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Speaker 1:

You're listening to RadioLab. Radio from W-N-Y-C. [inaudible 00:00:15] NPR.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Hey, I'm Jad Abrumrad. This is Radiolab.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Robert's traveling today, so it's just me and today we have a very different kind of story than we've ever done. It comes from a journalist and filmmaker named Luis Trellis, and an interesting thing kind of happened as we were reporting this.

 

Speaker 10:

It sounds pretty clear.

 

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

 

Speaker 10:

It's got to be a landline.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Luis and one of our producers, Tim Howard, had called up this guy Vladimir Ceballos, who is a filmmaker himself. Cuban guy; exile. And the interview happened to be just a few hours after Obama had made that big announcement.

 

Obama:

Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba. In the most significant changes in our policy and more than 50 years.

 

Jad Abrumad:

That happened just before the interview.

 

Tim Howard:

Hello, is this Vladimir?

 

Speaker 6:

Hey, we're recording.

 

Vladimir :

Yes, it's Vladimir.

 

Tim Howard:

Vladimir, how are you doing? This is Tim in New York. And we also have Luis.

 

Luis Trellis:

Hi Vlad. It's Luis.

 

Vladimir :

How are you Luis?

 

Luis Trellis:

Good, good.

 

Vladimir :

About the news, no?

 

Luis Trellis:

Yeah. Amazing news, right?

 

Vladimir :

I was crying.

 

Tim Howard:

Really?

 

Vladimir :

Yeah. I was crying, man.

 

Luis Trellis:

Yeah.

 

Vladimir :

First of all, you know, I've been here in the United States for 20 years and I never think that I was going to see this state, you know?

 

Tim Howard:

Really.

 

Obama:

We will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.

 

Vladimir :

Because it has been 50 year, 53 years since the United States.

 

Vladimir :

You know, the diplomatic relationship with Cuba.

 

Tim Howard:

Yeah.

 

Vladimir :

And nothing happened in Cuba. You know, everything is the same. Now, everything is going to change.

 

Speaker 1:

[inaudible 00:02:09]

 

Jad Abrumad:

Today, a collaboration with a fantastic program, Radio Ambulante. Luis Trellis comes to us from them. This is a story that predates the stuff you've been hearing in the news. In many ways, it's maybe a tiny dark preamble to all of that stuff. It's a story about Cuba, the power of music, and a group of Cuban kids who decide to opt out in this crazy way that when Luis Trellis told us about it, we almost couldn't believe.

 

Luis Trellis:

So the reason we called up Vladi is that we wanted to hear the backstory of all of this.

 

Vladimir :

Well, I was touring Pinar del Rio in 1964

 

Tim Howard:

Tell me about what it was like for you to be a kid.

 

Vladimir :

I was happy because in Cuba we didn't have any information. We didn't have any communication with anybody else outside Cuba. And everything that we've received, it was the news that they government want to give to us.

 

Tim Howard:

He remembers listening to endless Fidel Castro speeches on the radio.

 

Vladimir :

I remember when I was a kid in elementary school, all the time they were teaching us that Russia was the big country in the world, the big economy and everything that we would hope is to be like them.

 

Tim Howard:

Yeah.

 

Speaker 10:

It was a given that he would get in line every year to get his toy.

 

Vladimir :

You know, I only got three toys every year.

 

Speaker 11:

Cause of rationing?.

 

Speaker 10:

Exactly. And then every week he and his folks would wake up, they would go to the nearest church-

 

Vladimir :

To throw eggs at the church building.

 

Speaker 10:

Throw eggs?

 

Speaker 11:

Yeah, at the church?

 

Speaker 10:

Why?

 

Vladimir :

Because we didn't believe in God. That the government, they didn't believe in God. You know?

 

Speaker 10:

That's how you showed you were good revolutionary and Vladimir was just being a good boy.

 

Speaker 11:

But when he turns 14, there comes a day when a friend takes him aside and shows him a video of Led Zeppelin.

 

Vladimir :

I remember that day. I remember like-

 

Speaker 10:

Do you remember what Led Zeppelin song it was?

 

Vladimir :

Kashmir.

 

Speaker 10:

Kashmir.

 

Speaker 11:

Oh yeah.

 

Vladimir :

Yeah, Kashmir. It was my first time and I hear rock and roll music.

 

Speaker 10:

How did it make you feel when you heard Kashmir?

 

Vladimir :

Whoa. Different. You know, you see Robert playing and you see Jimmy Page with those long hair and they move. [inaudible 00:04:46]

 

Vladimir :

And the thing that they say, it was really different.

 

Vladimir :

And because of that, I was completely changed. Completely changed my life. Let me tell you, completely changed my life.

 

Speaker 10:

He's not sure why, but in that moment-

 

Vladimir :

I went from a good example to friki. I went to friki. I went to friki.

 

Speaker 11:

What is friki?

 

Speaker 10:

So frikis are what Cubans called the most extreme metal heads, hard rock, punk rockers.

 

Vladimir :

We start wearing different clothes, clothes with holes, and long hair.

 

Speaker 10:

Problem was-

 

Vladimir :

The Cuban radio station didn't put any rock music. I remember when I was 19 years old, 20 years old. My father give me a Russian radio and it was a good FM. We went to the roof of some friends because in those roof, you can listen to the station from Florida,

 

Vladimir :

Oh man. When we listen to Rolling Stone; Sympathy With The Devil.

 

Vladimir :

Hello Bay [foreign language 00:06:13]. Hello baby. Man!

 

Vladimir :

Barry Manilow. We were excited to listen Barry Manilow. After that, I didn't like it. No, but in the beginning, everything that came from there in English, it was good, you know. Because I don't know ,that kind of music give us another door.

 

Speaker 10:

So Vladi's walking around with ripped jeans, long hair and that's fine. It's normal youth rebellion. But then in the late eighties, everything changes.

 

Ronald Reagan:

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

 

Vladimir :

the Wall went down.

 

Speaker 12:

They are here in the thousands, they are here in the tens of thousands.

 

Speaker 10:

And in reaction? [foreign language 00:00:07:11].

 

Speaker 10:

The Castro government [inaudible 00:00:07:14].

 

Vladimir :

Fidel says, socialism or death.

 

Speaker 13:

His slogan is painted freshly all over Havana. Socialism or death.

 

Speaker 10:

Suddenly music you listened to became very ideological and if you listened to rock, you were listening to the enemy of the Cuban state; the United States.

 

Vladimir :

The Government created a police presence in every neighborhood, every five blocks.

 

Speaker 10:

And Vladimir says, if the police found you and you had long hair?

 

Vladimir :

They'd beat us, kick us.

 

Speaker 10:

Send you away to work, putting sugarcane in the cane fields.

 

Vladimir :

That's like that. Boom.

 

Speaker 10:

In school, they'd often cut your hair against your will.

 

Vladimir :

It was abuse.

 

Jad Abrumad:

And just to jump in, this is the point of the story where things take a very, no other way to say it, a very punk rock turn, because into this cultural war?

 

Speaker 14:

Steps a guy named-

 

Vladimir :

Papo.

 

Speaker 14:

Papo.

 

Vladimir :

We name him Papo La Bala.

 

Speaker 14:

Papo La Bala. You know, Papo the bullet. I really want to say that he tried to embody that. That kind of bullet to your brain, that wake up.

 

Speaker 10:

That's Bob Ariano. He's a professor at Southern Oregon University. He went several times in the 90s to Cuba to interview Papo, who he calls the Kurt Cobain of the frikis.

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah. He looked very intense. He was cocky and confident and just charismatic.

 

Speaker 10:

Super tall.

 

Speaker 14:

Skinny?

 

Vladimir :

Yeah. He always wear American Flag.

 

Speaker 14:

Oh yeah, yeah. Like a bandana.

 

Vladimir :

He use [inaudible 00:08:51].

 

Speaker 14:

Those are two friends of Papos, Jesus Diaz and Lisa Nandez who was also a band mate of his.

 

Speaker 15:

[foreign language 00:09:01]

 

Speaker 14:

So Luis remembers the first time he met Papo and it was on a night that a communist party meeting was taking place right outside his house.

 

Luis Trellis:

Outside the building. And when Papo's coming, he's coming in a bicycle. We, his head do not stay flag. And when he's coming.

 

Speaker 14:

On his head?.

 

Luis Trellis:

Yeah. My father going down [foreign language 00:09:33].

 

Speaker 14:

Your father, when he saw him come with the American flag on his head.

 

Luis Trellis:

Yeah. [foreign language 00:09:39] Are you crazy? Taking your flag out of your head. Papo say why? And everyone, outside the building, silence.

 

Vladimir :

Papa was a weird guy.

 

Papo La Bala:

[foreign language 00:10:05].

 

Speaker 14:

You can see video of Papo because Vladimir shot a documentary in 1994 where he interviewed Papo and some of the other frikis. And in that documentary, Papo talks about growing up poor-

 

Vladimir :

Father is an alcoholic. Mother, abandon.

 

Papo La Bala:

[foreign language 00:00:10:26]

 

Speaker 14:

By age 14, he's in the streets and a few years later he makes a decision that's really at the heart of this story.

 

Papo La Bala:

[foreign language 00:10:39]

 

Speaker 14:

Just to set it up so that you can understand the context.

 

Vladimir :

What happened was that in 1989 or I think 1990-

 

Speaker 14:

Somewhere around there, the Cuban government is fighting in Angola. It's backing a leftist liberation movement and it's kind of a proxy war with the United States. And in the late eighties Cuban soldiers start coming back home.

 

Vladimir :

And some soldiers from the Cuban army, there were in Africa, they came with HIV. HIV positive. And because of that, the government has all the people in Cuba tested with HIV.

 

Speaker 14:

If you belong to a high risk group, you were tested.

 

Vladimir :

They went to your place of work. They went to your apartment, they went to the school, they went to everybody.

 

Speaker 14:

Wow.

 

Vladimir :

I remember. They went to my work and they test everybody over there and [inaudible 00:11:29] your station. 50 people's over there.

 

Speaker 14:

Wow.

 

Vladimir :

Give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood.

 

Speaker 14:

Vladi says they would come in, take your blood. And if they found that you were positive-

 

Vladimir :

The police came, put you in the police car and goes straight to the Sanitorium.

 

Jad Abrumad:

They just locked you up?

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah.

 

Vladimir :

And I remembered, one day I was talking to him-

 

Speaker 14:

Papo and his wife?

 

Vladimir :

Papo said, [foreign language 00:11:58] I want to live free. Look, they're kicking me out. They're beating me out. They don't want me to live like a Roca here. They are doing a lot of things to me. I'm going to do a lot of thing to them. And he told me, look, I went to this rock concert in [inaudible 00:12:15].

 

Speaker 14:

Papo told him, I met up with these other rockers, they were HIV positive and I went and took a syringe, drew some blood from their arm and I put the needle in my own arm-

 

Vladimir :

And I jam myself with HIV.

 

Speaker 14:

Whoa.

 

Vladimir :

I gave myself with blood contaminated with HIV, you know? And I look at him, I said, man, do you know what you did? Do you know what are you doing? You're going to die, man. And he said to me, I don't care.

 

Jad Abrumad:

That's crazy though.

 

Vladimir :

That's crazy.

 

Speaker 14:

He knew for sure that when he did that, that he, that that was a death sentence?

 

Vladimir :

For him. Yes. He knows.

 

Speaker 14:

Vladimir's not quite sure that the others that came after Papo really knew what they were doing, but Papo knew.

 

Speaker 3:

Remember he says socialism or death. And he proposed to me, death is a door. When you don't have any more doors to open, death is a door.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Coming up. That door gets wider.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Oh, there's a walkthrough. And for at least a beat, they find something besides that. Something quite the opposite.

 

Speaker 1:

Message one.

 

Luis Trellis:

Hi, my name is Luis Trellis and Radiolab is supported in part by the outfit, the Sloan foundation and has the public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.

 

Speaker 1:

End this message,

 

Jad Abrumad:

Hey, I'm Jad Abrumad. This is Radiolab.

 

Speaker 2:

Yes. One. Two. One. Two. Mic chick.

 

Jad Abrumad:

That's Luis Trellis of Radio Ambulante. Let's go back to his story about Cuba and music in the late eighties and nineties and so far a dude has made a crazy decision. Dude named Papo to inject himself with HIV. Would you call it a protest?

 

Speaker 14:

I think Papo would have called it a protest, but not the guys that came after.

 

Jad Abrumad:

This is at a moment when there was a cultural war happening between the Castro government and anyone it deemed antisocial, which included kids with long hair who listened to rock. And it was also a moment where if you were found to be HIV positive in Cuba, you were forcibly quarantined.

 

Speaker 14:

So Papo injects himself and he gets sent to the Sanitarium.

 

Jad Abrumad:

And can you describe that place? Like what did he find?

 

Speaker 14:

Well, he found a beautiful place in the middle of the Pinar Del Rio countryside.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Really?

 

Speaker 14:

It's full of Palm trees. Very green, very lush. Farm animals roaming in.

 

Jad Abrumad:

And you went there?

 

Speaker 14:

Yes, yes, I was there. I was there. And there are still farm animals over there. Actually, they were roaming, a couple of cows and chickens. It's like kind of an idyllic place.

 

Speaker 14:

So I went there to visit the last two rockers that still remain in the place. There's Gerson Govea and his wife Yoandra, and they're kind of like the keepers of all that went down in there. The memories. So I spent a couple of days with them and they walked me around and it's full of like these little housing units.

 

Jad Abrumad:

And you're saying this place was idyllic even back then?

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah. Gerson and Yoandra are walking me through it and they're like, okay, so we would be walking around here 10 years ago and Nirvana would be coming out of here.

 

Speaker 14:

Metallica would be coming out of the next house.

 

Jad Abrumad:

No kidding.

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah. So it was like a headbangers ball in Pinar Del Rio.

 

Jad Abrumad:

But wait, but why? I mean, how come they were able to have that freedom in the Sanitarium but not outside?

 

Speaker 14:

Initially the Sanitarium system was under the military and it was more of a Gulag. But in the late eighties, early nineties the sanitariums went from the military being in charge to the Ministry of Health and Medicine. And these were by all accounts, very progressive doctors, very concerned about their patients. They gave them all the food and medicine they needed and they were like, you want to rock out? Go ahead.

 

Jad Abrumad:

So it's like a prison but it was also kind of a little bubble of freedom.

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah. And strangely enough, they soon found out that they even had power. Power they didn't have before. Vladi told me the story, the patients had said the Sanitarium could go out every 21 days for a day trip and some of the frikis would go out and just by flashing their ID cards that said they were AIDS patients, police would leave them alone.

 

Vladimir :

I remember in two or three occasions, that the police came [inaudible 00:17:23] and one of them have a syringe-

 

Speaker 14:

A syringe.

 

Vladimir :

A syringe full of blood.

 

Speaker 14:

And Vladi says the guy took out the blood and waved it at the police.

 

Vladimir :

And said, you want to come to me? Come in, came to me. And they were afraid of that.

 

Speaker 10:

And so word began to spread about what life was like inside the Sanitarium, and you have to keep in mind that outside, Cuba was falling apart.

 

Speaker 15:

Hard economic times in Cuba, the government today tightened bread rationing and raised egg prices. It blamed delays in Soviet shipments to Cuba.

 

Speaker 10:

Almost overnight, after the fall of the Soviet union, Cuba was left without the massive subsidies that used to get. That meant-

 

Speaker 15:

Long lines for bread, short tempers.

 

Vladimir :

We were suffering.

 

Speaker 10:

Vladimir Ceballos who never actually lived inside the Sanitarium. He says that people outside were going hungry and he himself-

 

Vladimir :

I was weighing like a hundred pounds, 98 pounds.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Oh my God.

 

Speaker 10:

And as thing's just kept getting worse.

 

Vladimir :

You see like a-

 

Speaker 15:

Hungry. Sunburned. Dehydrated.

 

Vladimir :

50,000 people leave Cuba.

 

Speaker 15:

They managed to escape on a raft and make it to the Florida keys. These days more Cubans than ever, are taking the risk.

 

Vladimir :

It was the big crisis, you know, in the Clinton era. But-

 

Speaker 10:

If you were in the Sanitorium, you were fine.

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah.

 

Speaker 10:

Just being able to get milk and an egg and beans.

 

Speaker 14:

[foreign language 00:00:18:53] says that that was a big motivation for a lot of kids.

 

Speaker 16:

Yes, I'm not going to be harassed. Yes, I'm free. And yes, I also get meals.

 

Speaker 14:

And it went from being a couple of self injectors, a couple of dozen self injectors to being hundreds.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Whoa. And did the government know that this was happening?

 

Speaker 14:

Well, there's this Swedish documentary from the time it's called "Socialist o muerte" and in it there's this Bishop of Havana [foreign language 00:19:28]. His last name is [inaudible 00:19:29] 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, [foreign language 00:19:42]. These kids they're injecting themselves and Fidel couldn't believe it.

 

Vladimir :

And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell syringe anymore. They put a low that injecting self with HIV, you going to spend eight years in prison.

 

Speaker 14:

But it didn't matter.

 

Vladimir :

It was like a movement. It was like a movement.

 

Speaker 10:

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 Las Vegas [foreign language 00:20:25], which is like a half hour or 45 minutes South of Havana. You have the first group that gets formed, it's called VIH, which translates to HIV.

 

Speaker 10:

But then in center of the island, in this town called Santa Clara. You had the Cuban punk band, Escoria and Escoria translates as-

 

Speaker 14:

Scum right? Escoria.

 

Speaker 10:

And according to Bob, if you look back to the eighties, the people who were fleeing Cuba-

 

Speaker 14:

the [foreign language 00:20:53], the rafters. One of the responses of the Cuban government were billboards that said [foreign language 00:21:01] escoria. Let the scum leave. So to call yourself Escoria, to call yourself scum. That is punk rock.

 

Jad Abrumad:

And were these bands big outside the sanitorium too?

 

Speaker 14:

Escoria, is, I mean you can't talk about Cuban punk without, I mean Escoria is-.

 

Jad Abrumad:

So their tapes got out or something.

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah, totally.

 

Jad Abrumad:

And what happens next? I mean these bands are forming, kids are self injecting. Does it just keep growing and growing?

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah. [foreign language 00:21:30]. There's tape of [inaudible 00:21:33] and Yoandra saying that it got to be so fashionable, that kids started to think that in order to be a friki, you had to have AIDS.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Really?

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah. There was some tape of Yoandra saying [foreign language 00:21:48] which is, and the kids were saying that if you really want it to be a rocker in that time, you had to have AIDS.

 

Speaker 10:

It's like the fact that it went from ten or twenty to 200 or more was obviously like this kind of just joiner phenomenon of like, that's so cool, I'm going to do it too.

 

Speaker 10:

There was even talk among some of the young people I met, of thinking that, h, eventually Fidel and those guys will find a cure.

 

Vladimir :

You're going to find a cure for this.

 

Speaker 10:

Cuba with the one of the best health care systems in the Western hemisphere.

 

Vladimir :

We're going to live forever.

 

Vladimir :

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

 

Speaker 14:

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.

 

Vladimir :

He was the first and when the second die and when the third die, everything stop.

 

Speaker 14:

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

 

Vladimir :

And when they start seeing how you die, because you don't die like a normal person who had a heart attack or anything. No. You transform yourself.

 

Speaker 14:

A lot of them went blind. Then they went insane. They started getting opportunistic diseases. You know how AID works.

 

Vladimir :

Seeing that, this time thinking about what they did.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Did kids start saying they wished they hadn't done this?

 

Speaker 14:

well, when you see Vladi's documentary and that Swedish documentary "Socialist o muerte", which was made in 1995, you definitely see the kids having deep regrets. You have one of them saying, I regret this. I regret it a million times.

 

Jad Abrumad:

how about Papo?

 

Speaker 14:

Well, I don't. I never heard Papa ever questioned that he had done it.

 

Speaker 10:

And in that Swedish documentary, there's a scene towards the end where you see Papo and he's clearly sick. He's real thin, his face is swollen, and we see him stepping into an evangelical church.

 

Speaker 10:

He's wearing a Nirvana tee-shirt, but he's become a fervent Christian man. He's found this community of evangelical Christians that accepts AIDS patients and he's still taunting the government because he says, [foreign language 00:24:34] he's still a rocker and that he thinks that Christ is the perfect communist.

 

Speaker 10:

If more communists were like the Christians, that would be perfect.

 

Speaker 14:

It's interesting though, because in that last video we also see him taking English classes and he's saying like, you know, the other patients in the Sanitarium, they're like sick like me. They won't go out at night. They won't rock out til the early morning. But I'm like, this is my life.

 

Jad Abrumad:

So he was sort of defiant to the end.

 

Speaker 14:

Yeah.

 

Papo La Bala:

[foreign language 00:25:16].

 

Speaker 14:

And a few months later, according to Gerson, Papo started to bleed out from his mouth. And eyes. He had a parasite in his brain. He became violent and he died from that disease.

 

Jad Abrumad:

God. Part of me wonders like, is this strong and fierce or is it just dumb and sad and maybe fear. It's also like, I can't figure out how to feel about this.

 

Speaker 10:

Yeah. Well I think it can be all those things, right? It was dumb and stupid and immature and it was also nihilistic and anarchic.

 

Jad Abrumad:

And do you think in the end it had any impact?

 

Speaker 10:

Well, that's hard to say. It must have. It must have.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Here's how Luis puts it. Not even five years after Papo died, things did start to shift in Cuba. Make it of what you will, but December 8th, 2000 Castro unveils a statue of John Lennon. That same year, Bob Ariano and a bunch of rock musicians-

 

Speaker 10:

including Will Oldham, David Pajo

 

Jad Abrumad:

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-

 

Speaker 10:

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

 

Speaker 10:

and everyone's singing along.

 

Jad Abrumad:

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 these frikis were streaming into the sanitorium-

 

Luis Trellis:

Cuba wasn't changing back then. It started to change precisely because of a hundred gestures big and small.

 

Jad Abrumad:

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

 

Luis Trellis:

And then you have the Maleconazo, which was like the first serious civil disobedience that Castro had in '94 where just the 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.

 

Jad Abrumad:

So at this moment, you know, late eighties-early nineties-

 

Luis Trellis:

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.

 

Jad Abrumad:

It's like this sort of a thousand points of light and this is the brightest point, right? Or the darkest point frankly.

 

Luis Trellis:

Right, exactly.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Huge thank you to Luis Trellis of Radio Ambulante. We were thrilled to collaborate with Radio Ambulante and a thank you to Daniel Alarcon for making that collaboration possible. If you don't know Radio Ambulante, check them out. Radioambulante.org., They tell these incredible stories from around the Spanish speaking world in Spanish. They're some very hard hitting stories. Radioambulante.org. We'll also point you to them at Radiolab.org. Also they've created a Spanish version, Spanish language version of this story which goes in a different direction, goes into way more depth into Luis's visit to Cuba. And the story of Gerson and Yoandra, the last two remaining self-infected frikis and we may just put that story in our podcast feed for the Spanish speakers out there who want to hear their story.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Thank you to Vladimir Ceballos and Barbara Yana for use of their documentaries. This story was produced by Tim Howard, who I'm very sad to say is leaving us this week.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Tim, we love you. We wish you the best. We had production support from Matt Kielty and Andy Mills and original music from [inaudible 00:30:41] and the Cuban punk bands, HIV and Escoria.

 

Jad Abrumad:

Robert Krulwich, will be back next podcast. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

 

Speaker 11:

You have two new messages. Message one.

 

Bob Ariano:

Hey, this is Bob Ariano calling from lovely Talent, Oregon. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.

 

Bob Ariano:

Our staff includes [inaudible 00:31:05], Brenna Farrell, Aaron Horn, Dylan Keefe, the great Matt Kielty, Lynn Levy, Andy Mills, Lattice Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Patchett, Ariane Whack, Molly Webster, Thorin Wheeler and Jamie York. With help from Danny Lewis and Kelly [inaudible 00:00:31:20].

 

Bob Ariano:

Our fact checker for this episode was Michelle Harris.

 

Speaker 14:

Special thanks to Bob Adriano that he made for the audios and the Swedish TV channel, SVT for use of the documentary "Socialisto o muerte". And of course these credits wouldn't be complete without a great, amazing shout out to the great Tim Howard. Okay. Bye. Adios amigo.

 

Speaker 11:

End this message.

 

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