Los Frikis

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Speaker 2 I'm Latzif Nasser. This is Radiolab.
And today on the show, we have a story from our archives.

Speaker 7 It's about a group of kids growing up in Cuba in the 90s.

Speaker 2 And these kids, who had great great taste in music, by the way, they decided to do something extreme. They decided to escape this system by any means necessary.

Speaker 2 We wanted to play it for you now, in part because it's Hispanic Heritage Month, but also because of what's going on in Cuba now. In 2025, Cuba is facing a major economic crisis.

Speaker 2 There are power outages, food shortages, protests.

Speaker 2 The government is punishing dissent and public criticism, all of which is similar to the situation that was playing out in the 90s when our story begins, and that these kids were directly responding to.

Speaker 2 So, we're going to play you this episode, and then we have a quick update for you at the end. So, here you are, Lost Freakies.

Speaker 10 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 8 You're listening

Speaker 3 to Radio Lab

Speaker 8 from

Speaker 11 WNYC.

Speaker 15 Hey, I'm Jad Abumra. This is Radio Lab.
Robert's traveling today, so it's just me. And today we have a very different kind of story than we've ever done.

Speaker 15 It comes from a journalist and filmmaker named Luis Traeus.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 an interesting thing kind of happened as we were reporting this.

Speaker 16 Sounds pretty clear. Yeah.
It's got to be a landline.

Speaker 15 Luis and one of our producers, Tim Howard, had called up this guy, Vladimir Sebaios,

Speaker 15 who is a filmmaker himself, Cuban guy, exile.

Speaker 15 And the interview happened to be just a few hours after Obama had made that big announcement.

Speaker 17 Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba

Speaker 17 in the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.

Speaker 15 That happened just before the interview.

Speaker 16 Hello, is this Vladimir? Hey, we're recording. Yes, it's Vladimir.
How are you you doing? This is Tim in New York, and we also have Luis.

Speaker 20 Hi, Vlad. It's

Speaker 13 Luis.

Speaker 7 How are you, Luis? Good, good.

Speaker 8 About the news, no?

Speaker 21 Yeah, amazing news, right?

Speaker 8 Man, I was crying, man.

Speaker 10 Really?

Speaker 22 Yeah, I was crying, man.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 22 First of all, you know, I've been here in the United States for 20 years

Speaker 22 and I never

Speaker 22 think that I was going to see this day, you know.

Speaker 17 Really? We will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.

Speaker 23 Because

Speaker 22 it has been

Speaker 22 53 years since the United States, you know, broke the relationship with diplomatic relationship with Cuba and nothing happened in Cuba.

Speaker 22 You know, everything is the same.

Speaker 22 Now,

Speaker 22 everything is going to change.

Speaker 15 Today, a collaboration with a fantastic program, Radio Embolante, Luis Traeus comes to us from them. This is a story that predates the stuff you've been hearing in the news.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 in this crazy way that when Luis Traeus told us about it, we almost couldn't believe.

Speaker 26 So, the reason we called up Vladi is that we wanted to hear the backstory of all of this.

Speaker 22 Well, I was born in Final del Rio in 1964.

Speaker 2 Tell me about what it was like for you to be a kid.

Speaker 22 I was happy because in Cuba, we didn't have any information,

Speaker 22 we didn't have any communication with anybody outside Cuba. And everything that we received, it was the you know the news that the government want to give us to us.

Speaker 31 He remembers listening to endless Fidel Castro speeches on the radio.

Speaker 22 I remember when I was a kid in elementary school, all the time they were teaching us that Russia

Speaker 22 was the big country in the world, the big economy, and everything that we would hope is to be like then.

Speaker 11 It was a given that he would get in line every year to get his toy.

Speaker 22 You You know, you only got three toys every year.

Speaker 24 Because of rationing? Exactly.

Speaker 11 And then every week, he and his folks would wake up.

Speaker 24 They would go to the nearest church.

Speaker 27 To throw eggs at the shore's building.

Speaker 3 Throw eggs at the church?

Speaker 8 Why?

Speaker 22 Because we didn't believe in God. The government, they didn't believe in God, you know?

Speaker 24 That's how you showed you were a good revolutionary and Vladimir was just being a good boy.

Speaker 37 But when he turns 14, there comes a day when a friend takes him aside and shows him a video of of Led Zeppelin.

Speaker 22 I remember that day. I remember like it.

Speaker 16 Do you remember what Led Zeppelin song it was?

Speaker 22 Cashimir.

Speaker 8 Cashmere. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 19 Yeah, Cashimir.

Speaker 22 It was my first time that I hear rock and roll music.

Speaker 16 How did it make you feel when you heard Cashmere?

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 10 different.

Speaker 22 You know, you see Robert Plain and you see Jimmy Page with those long long hair and

Speaker 22 the move that they had

Speaker 22 and the thing that they say, it was really different.

Speaker 22 And because of that, you know,

Speaker 22 I was

Speaker 8 completely changed.

Speaker 22 Completely changed my life.

Speaker 22 Let me tell you, completely changed my life.

Speaker 35 He's not sure why,

Speaker 33 but in that moment,

Speaker 22 I went from a good example to freaky.

Speaker 22 I went too freaky. I went too freaky.

Speaker 15 What is freaky?

Speaker 34 So freakies are what Cubans call the most extreme metalheads, hard rock, punk rockers.

Speaker 22 We start wearing dirty clothes, clothes with holes,

Speaker 22 long hair. Problem was?

Speaker 22 The Cuban radio station didn't put any rock music. I remember when I was 19 years old, 20 years old, my father gave me a

Speaker 22 Russian radio and it was a good FM. We went to the roof of some friends because in those roofs, you can listen to the station from Florida.

Speaker 8 Oh man, when we listen to Rolling Stone,

Speaker 22 Sympathy with the Devil. Hello, baby.

Speaker 15 Hello, babe. Semi-Higger.

Speaker 8 Hello, baby.

Speaker 29 Man,

Speaker 8 Barry Mermilo, we were excited to listen to Barry Marlowe.

Speaker 22 After that, I didn't like enough, but in the beginning, everything that came from there in English was good, you know, because I don't know that kind of music gives us another

Speaker 25 door.

Speaker 37 So, Vladi's walking around with ripped jeans, long hair, and that's fine.

Speaker 24 It's a normal youth rebellion.

Speaker 34 But then, in the late 80s, everything changes.

Speaker 40 Mr. Gorbachev, open

Speaker 40 this gate.

Speaker 40 Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

Speaker 25 The wall

Speaker 22 went down.

Speaker 41 They are here in the thousands. They are here in the tens of thousands.

Speaker 8 And in reaction,

Speaker 31 the Castro government dug in.

Speaker 2 Fidel says, Socialismo, socialism,

Speaker 10 or death.

Speaker 38 His slogan is painted freshly all over Havana, socialism or death.

Speaker 19 Suddenly, music you listen to became very ideological, and if you listen to rock, you were listening to the enemy of the Cuban state, the United States.

Speaker 2 The government created a police present in every neighborhood, every five blocks.

Speaker 11 And Vladimir says, if the police found you and you had long hair, they'd beat us, kick us, send you away to work cutting sugar cane in the cane fields. Just like that.

Speaker 39 In school, they'd often cut your hair against your will.

Speaker 22 He must have used.

Speaker 15 And just to jump in, this is the point in the story where things take a very,

Speaker 15 no other way to say it, a very punk rock turn.

Speaker 33 Because into this cultural war steps a guy named Papua Papua

Speaker 32 Papo Labala. Papo Labala.

Speaker 42 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 9 That's Bob Orellano.

Speaker 33 He's a professor at Southern Oregon University.

Speaker 27 He went several times in the 90s to Cuba to interview Papua who he calls the Kurt Cobain of the freakies.

Speaker 42 Yeah, he looked very intense.

Speaker 42 He was cocky and confident and just charismatic.

Speaker 28 Super tall. Skinny.

Speaker 44 Yeah, he always wore an American flat.

Speaker 46 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 15 Like a bandana. He usually

Speaker 24 Papo's, Jesus Diaz and Luis Hernandez, who was also a bandmate of his.

Speaker 31 So Luis remembers the first time he met Papo, and it was

Speaker 26 on a night that a Communist Party meeting was taking place right outside his house.

Speaker 45 Outside the building, and when Papo is coming, he's coming in a bicycle and we he's had

Speaker 45 a a flat, you know, stay flat.

Speaker 46 And when he's coming

Speaker 21 on his head,

Speaker 45 yeah, my father, my father going down,

Speaker 19 your father hit, your father hit when he saw him coming with the American flag on his head.

Speaker 45 Yeah, me paramio second,

Speaker 44 y Le Dijo Papo, tutas logo.

Speaker 13 Are you crazy?

Speaker 45 Taking you flat out

Speaker 44 of your head.

Speaker 45 Papo say, Why? Why? And everyone outside the building,

Speaker 45 silence

Speaker 42 Papo was

Speaker 7 a weird guy.

Speaker 24 You can see video of Papo because Vladimir shot a documentary in 1994 where he interviewed Papo and some of the other freakies. And in that documentary, Papo talks about growing up poor.

Speaker 8 Father is an alcoholic.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 11 Just to set it up so that you can understand the context.

Speaker 22 What happened was that in 1989, I think 1990, somewhere around there, the Cuban government is fighting in Angola.

Speaker 24 It's backing a leftist liberation movement and it's kind of a proxy war with the United States. And in the late 80s, Cuban soldiers start coming back home.

Speaker 22 And some soldiers from the Cuban army that were in Africa, they came with HIV.

Speaker 22 HIV positive.

Speaker 22 And because of that, the government has all the people in Cuba tested with HIV.

Speaker 11 If you belong to a high-risk group, you were tested.

Speaker 22 They went to your place of work, they went to your apartment, they went to the school, they went to everybody.

Speaker 22 Wow. I remember they went, they went to my ward and they test everybody over there in the radio station.
50 people over there. Wow.

Speaker 22 Give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood.

Speaker 22 Vladis says they would come in, take your blood, and if they found that you were positive, the police came, put you in the in the police car, and go straight to the sanatory.

Speaker 15 They just locked you up?

Speaker 22 Yeah. And I remember

Speaker 22 I remember one day I was talking to him.

Speaker 35 Papo and his wife.

Speaker 22 Papo said, Look,

Speaker 22 I want to live free.

Speaker 22 Look, they are kicking me out, they are beating me out, they don't want me to live like a rocker here.

Speaker 22 They are doing a lot of things to me. I'm going to do a lot of things to them.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 22 he told me, Look, I went to this rock concert in Villa Clara.

Speaker 33 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 and I jet myself with HIV

Speaker 22 and jet myself with with blow contaminated with with it with HIV you know and I look at him said man do you know what you did do you know what are you doing

Speaker 16 you're gonna die man and he said to me I don't care that's crazy it was crazy he he knew for sure that when he did that that he that that was a death sentence for him yes he knows

Speaker 38 vladimir is not quite sure that the others that came after papo really knew what they were doing but but papo knew remember he says socialism

Speaker 22 death and papo says to me

Speaker 15 death is a door

Speaker 22 When you don't have any more doors to open, death is a door.

Speaker 15 Coming up, that door gets wider, others walk through.

Speaker 15 And for at least a beat, they find something besides death, something quite the opposite.

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Speaker 15 Hey, I'm Jada Bumra. This is Radiolab.

Speaker 34 Yes, 1-2-1-2, Mike, check.

Speaker 15 That's Luis Traeus of Radio and Melante. Let's go back to his story about Cuba and music in the late 80s and 90s.

Speaker 15 And so far, a dude has made a crazy decision, a dude named Papo, to inject himself with HIV. Would you call it a protest?

Speaker 35 I think

Speaker 23 Papo would have called it a protest, but not the guys that came after.

Speaker 15 This is at a moment when there was a cultural war happening between the Castor government and anyone it deemed antisocial, which included kids with long hair who listened to rock.

Speaker 15 And it was also a moment where if you were found to be HIV positive in Cuba, you were forcibly quarantined.

Speaker 11 So Papo injects himself and he gets sent to the sanitarium.

Speaker 15 And can you describe that place? Like, what did he find?

Speaker 50 Well, he found a beautiful place in the middle of the Pinar de Rio countryside.

Speaker 36 Really?

Speaker 17 It's full of palm trees,

Speaker 34 very green, very lush.

Speaker 37 farm animals roaming in.

Speaker 10 Huh.

Speaker 15 And you went there?

Speaker 43 Yes, yes, I was there.

Speaker 37 I was there, and there are still farm animals.

Speaker 8 Chile they would roam in a couple of cows and chickens.

Speaker 24 It's like kind of an idyllic place.

Speaker 23 So I went there to visit the last two rockers that still remain in the place.

Speaker 20 Giuse

Speaker 23 and his wife, Johanna.

Speaker 24 And they're kind of like the keepers of all that went down in there, the memories.

Speaker 11 So I spent a couple of days with them and they

Speaker 11 walked me around and it's full of like these little housing units.

Speaker 15 And you're saying this place was idyllic even back then?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Girsten and Joanda 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 11 Metallica would be coming out of the next house.

Speaker 9 No kidding.

Speaker 24 Yeah, so it was like a headbanger's ball in Pinard de Rio, you know?

Speaker 15 Wait, but why? I mean, how come they were able to have that freedom in the sanatorium, but not outside?

Speaker 37 Initially, the sanitarium system was under the military, and it was more of a gulag.

Speaker 31 But in the late 80s, early 90s, the sanitariums went from the military being in charge to the Ministry of Health and Medicine.

Speaker 28 And these were, by all accounts, very progressive doctors, very concerned about their patients.

Speaker 11 They gave them all the food and medicine they needed.

Speaker 37 And they were like, you want to rock out?

Speaker 24 Go ahead.

Speaker 15 So it was like a prison, but it was also kind of a little bubble of freedom.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 11 And strangely enough, they soon found out that they even had power.

Speaker 22 No police would have.

Speaker 11 Power they didn't have before.

Speaker 24 Vladi told me this story.

Speaker 34 The patients said the sanitarium could go out every 21 days for a day trip.

Speaker 34 And some of the freakies would go out and just by flashing their ID cards that said they were AIDS patients, police would leave them alone.

Speaker 22 I remember in two or three occasions that the police came after them and one of them has a

Speaker 29 gering.

Speaker 10 A syringe.

Speaker 32 A syringe full of blood.

Speaker 19 And Vladi says the guy took out the blood and waved it at the police.

Speaker 22 And said, you want to come to me?

Speaker 29 Come in.

Speaker 22 Came to me.

Speaker 22 And they were afraid of that.

Speaker 9 And so, word began to spread about what life was like inside the sanitarium. And you have to keep in mind that outside,

Speaker 24 Cuba was falling apart.

Speaker 53 Hard economic times in Cuba. The government today tightened bread rationing and raised egg prices.
It blamed delays in Soviet shipments to Cuba.

Speaker 27 Almost overnight after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was left without the massive subsidies it used to get.

Speaker 53 That meant long lines for bread.

Speaker 22 short tempers we were we were suffering vladimir cevallos who never actually lived inside the sanitarium he says that people outside were going hungry and he himself i was weighing like a hundred pounds 98 pounds oh my god and as things just kept getting worse you see like a hungry sunburn dehydrated 50 000 people leave cuba they managed to escape on a raft and make it to the florida keys

Speaker 41 These days, more Cubans than ever are taking the risk.

Speaker 22 That was the big crisis, you know,

Speaker 33 If you were in the sanatorium,

Speaker 24 you were fine.

Speaker 42 Yeah, just being able to get milk and an egg and beans.

Speaker 26 Bob Arellano says that that was a big motivation for a lot of kids.

Speaker 42 Yes, I'm not going to be harassed. Yes, I'm free.
And yes, I also get meals.

Speaker 24 And it went from being a couple of self-injectors, a couple of dozen self-injectors, to being hundreds.

Speaker 8 Wow.

Speaker 15 And did the government know that this was happening?

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 11 there's this Swedish documentary from the time, it's called Socialismo Muerte, and in it there's this bishop of Havana.

Speaker 26 His last name is Cespes, and he says that he met some of the kids that were injecting themselves with AIDS.

Speaker 34 And that at a state dinner, he approached Fidel.

Speaker 15 He told him,

Speaker 38 these kids, they're injecting themselves and Fidel

Speaker 21 couldn't believe it.

Speaker 22 And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell syringe anymore. They put a law that if you didn't inject themselves with HIV, you're going to spend eight years in prison.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 22 it didn't matter. It was like a movement.

Speaker 22 It was like a movement

Speaker 25 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 that gets formed it's called vellache which translates to hiv

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 42 Escoria.

Speaker 42 And according to Bob, if you look back to the 80s, the people who were fleeing Cuba, the balceros, the rafters, one of the responses of the Cuban government were billboards that said, Que valley la escoria, que se vallan, let the scum leave.

Speaker 42 So to call yourself Escoria, to call yourself scum, that is

Speaker 46 punk rock.

Speaker 15 And were these bands big outside the sanatorium too?

Speaker 14 Escoria is, I mean, you can't talk about Cuban punk without, I mean, Escoria is like.

Speaker 15 So their tapes got out or something.

Speaker 8 Yeah, totally.

Speaker 15 And what happens next? I mean, these bands are forming, kids are self-injecting. Does it just keep growing and growing?

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 38 There's a tape of Herson and Joandra saying that it got to be so fashionable that

Speaker 34 kids started to think that in order to be a freakie, you had to have AIDS.

Speaker 24 Like it was, yeah, no, there was paper duanda saying,

Speaker 11 which is, and the kids were saying that if you really wanted to be a rocker in that time, you had to have AIDS.

Speaker 42 It's like the fact that it went from 10 or 20 to 200 or more was obviously like this kind of just

Speaker 42 joiner phenomenon of like, that's so cool, I'm going to do it too.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 22 We're gonna find a cure for this.

Speaker 42 Cuba, with the best, one of the best health care systems in the Western hemisphere, we're gonna live forever.

Speaker 22 But everything starts to change when the first of them die.

Speaker 20 According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinardel Rio was a guy named Manuel.

Speaker 11 We don't know his last name or his age.

Speaker 15 He was the first.

Speaker 22 And when the second died, and when the third died, everything stopped.

Speaker 33 At one point in Vladi's documentary, which was made in 1994,

Speaker 38 Papu says that in two years,

Speaker 20 about 18 people died.

Speaker 22 And they started seeing how you died.

Speaker 32 Because you don't die like a normal person who had a heart attack or anything.

Speaker 22 No, you transform yourself.

Speaker 47 A lot of them went blind, then they went insane, they started getting opportunistic diseases.

Speaker 23 You know how AIDS works.

Speaker 22 Seeing that, they started thinking about what they did.

Speaker 15 Did kids start saying they wish they hadn't done this?

Speaker 20 Well, when you see Vladi's documentary and that Swedish documentary, Socialism,

Speaker 33 which was made in 1995,

Speaker 38 you definitely see the kids having

Speaker 27 deep regrets.

Speaker 33 You have one of them saying,

Speaker 36 I regret this.

Speaker 33 I regret it a million times.

Speaker 36 How about Papo?

Speaker 42 Well, I don't, I never heard Papo ever question that he had done it.

Speaker 20 And in that Swedish documentary, there's a scene towards the end where you see Papo and he's clearly sick.

Speaker 38 He's real thin, his face is swollen.

Speaker 39 And we see him stepping into an evangelical church.

Speaker 31 He's wearing an Urvana t-shirt, but he's become a fervent Christian.

Speaker 31 He's found this community of evangelical Christians that accepts AIDS patients.

Speaker 11 And he's still taunting the government because he says,

Speaker 31 He's still a rocker, and that he thinks that Christ is the perfect communist. If more communists were like the Christians, that would be perfect.

Speaker 31 It's interesting though, because in that last video, we also see him taking English classes.

Speaker 31 And he's saying, like, you know,

Speaker 31 the other patients in the sanitarium, they're like sick like me.

Speaker 21 They won't go out at night.

Speaker 31 They won't rock out till the early morning. But I'm like,

Speaker 31 this is my life.

Speaker 15 So he was sort of defiant to the end. Yeah.

Speaker 34 And a few months later, according to Gurson,

Speaker 34 Papo started to bleed out from his mouth

Speaker 36 and eyes.

Speaker 33 He had a parasite in his brain.

Speaker 36 He became

Speaker 36 violent.

Speaker 52 And

Speaker 20 he died from that disease.

Speaker 15 God, pardon me, wondering: is this strong and fierce, or is it just dumb and sad?

Speaker 15 And maybe fierce, also.

Speaker 8 Like, I can't figure out how to feel about this.

Speaker 11 Yeah, well, I think it can be all those things, right?

Speaker 34 It was dumb and stupid and immature, and it was also nihilistic and anarchic.

Speaker 15 And do you think, in the end, it had any impact?

Speaker 38 Well, that's that's hard to say.

Speaker 52 Um,

Speaker 11 it must have,

Speaker 11 It must have.

Speaker 15 Here's how Luis puts it. Not even five years after Papo died,

Speaker 15 things did start to shift in Cuba. Make of it what you will, but December 8th, 2000, Castro unveils the statue of John Lennon.

Speaker 15 That same year,

Speaker 15 Bob Ariano and a bunch of rock musicians, including Will Oldham, David Pajo.

Speaker 15 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 42 They announced, listen, we're going to send out this next number to Papo Labala and the Freakies.

Speaker 42 And

Speaker 35 everyone sang along.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 Luis says that back when the freakies were streaming into the sanatorium.

Speaker 31 Cuba wasn't changing back then. It started to change precisely because of a hundred gestures, big and small.

Speaker 15 He says around Cuba at that moment, there are all of these tiny, mostly silent protests taking hold.

Speaker 21 And then you have the Maleconaso, 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.

Speaker 11 They were angry at their poor living conditions. They were leaving the city in rafts by the thousands, by the hundreds.

Speaker 20 Castro literally had to come down to the Cuban Malecón, the beautiful

Speaker 52 seaside road that circles around Havana, and he literally had to talk the mob down.

Speaker 21 So at this moment, you know, late 80s, early 90s, there's this breeding ground of discontent all over Cuba.

Speaker 31 And I think the self-injector movement is the best crystallization we have of that.

Speaker 15 It's like this sort of a thousand points of light, and this is the brightest point, right? Or the darkest point, frankly.

Speaker 8 Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 Okay, so it's Letif here again.

Speaker 2 Now, the reporter who reported this story back in 2015, Luis Treyas, has an update for you from now, 2025.

Speaker 5 So here it is.

Speaker 18 Since this story first ran, Bob Arellano has continued traveling to Cuba to work with Vladimir Seballos on a documentary about the self-injector movement and the Cuban rock scene.

Speaker 18 I've stayed in touch with Gerson. He's the self-injected punk rocker I visited in the abandoned sanatorium.
He's still living there along with his partner, Joandra.

Speaker 18 He tells me that with Cuba's deep political and economic crisis, it's hard to be in a punk band. His town has 18-hour blackouts and even plugging in a guitar is tough.

Speaker 18 But Gerson says he still thinks about Papo Labala. He says that in today's Cuba, Papo would be doing the same thing he did when he was alive.

Speaker 23 He would be finding a way to stay true to himself and keeping it metal.

Speaker 2 Huge thank you to Luis. He now works as senior editor on the Embedded podcast.
That's NPR's home for deeply reported narrative series. And thank you to Radio Ambulante.

Speaker 2 We were so excited to collaborate with them back in 2015. And thank you to Daniel Alarcone for making that collaboration possible.

Speaker 2 Radio Ambulante's new season, which is its 15th season, launches on September 30th. If you don't know them, check it out, radioambulante.org.

Speaker 2 They tell these incredible stories from around the Spanish-speaking world in Spanish.

Speaker 2 Back in 2015, they also created a Spanish version, a Spanish-language version of this story, which goes kind of in a different direction.

Speaker 2 It goes way more in depth into Luisa's visit to Cuba and the story of Gerson and Johandra, the last two remaining self-infected freakies.

Speaker 2 Thank you to Vladimir Sebayos and Bob Arellano for the use of their documentaries and to Alio Dai and the Cuban punk bands HIV and Escoria for their original music in this episode. I'm Latif Nasser.

Speaker 2 Thank you for listening.

Speaker 57 Hi, I'm Marcela and I'm from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. And here are the staff credits.
Credit Lab was created by Dad Avomrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Speaker 57 Luma Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design.
Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W.

Speaker 57 Harry Fartuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez-Sindu, Nyama Sambandan, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Meeson, Sarah Carey, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Beetz, Arianne Wack, Pack Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young.

Speaker 57 With help from Rebecca Rand, our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Ana Pujol Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 58 Hi, this is Celeste calling from Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 58 Foundational support for Radiolab is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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