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This is Radiolab.

And today on the show, we have a story from our archives.

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

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.

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.

There are power outages, food shortages, protests.

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.

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.

Wait, you're listening.

You're listening

to Radio Lab

from

WNYC.

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.

It comes from a journalist and filmmaker named Luis Traeus.

And

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

Sounds pretty clear.

Yeah.

It's got to be a landline.

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

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.

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

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

That happened just before the interview.

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.

Hi, Vlad.

It's

Luis.

How are you, Luis?

Good, good.

About the news, no?

Yeah, amazing news, right?

Man, I was crying, man.

Really?

Yeah, I was crying, man.

Yeah.

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 day, you know.

Really?

We will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.

Because

it has been

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

You know, everything is the same.

Now,

everything is going to change.

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.

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 Traeus told us about it, we almost couldn't believe.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 then.

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

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

Because of rationing?

Exactly.

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

They would go to the nearest church.

To throw eggs at the shore's building.

Throw eggs at the church?

Why?

Because we didn't believe in God.

The government, they didn't believe in God, you know?

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

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

I remember that day.

I remember like it.

Do you remember what Led Zeppelin song it was?

Cashimir.

Cashmere.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, Cashimir.

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

How did it make you feel when you heard Cashmere?

Well,

different.

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

the move that they had

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

And because of that, you know,

I was

completely changed.

Completely changed my life.

Let me tell you, completely changed my life.

He's not sure why,

but in that moment,

I went from a good example to freaky.

I went too freaky.

I went too freaky.

What is freaky?

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

We start wearing dirty clothes, clothes with holes,

long hair.

Problem was?

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

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.

Oh man, when we listen to Rolling Stone,

Sympathy with the Devil.

Hello, baby.

Hello, babe.

Semi-Higger.

Hello, baby.

Man,

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

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

door.

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

It's a normal youth rebellion.

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

Mr.

Gorbachev, open

this gate.

Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

The wall

went down.

They are here in the thousands.

They are here in the tens of thousands.

And in reaction,

the Castro government dug in.

Fidel says, Socialismo, socialism,

or death.

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

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.

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

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.

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

He must have used.

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

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

Because into this cultural war steps a guy named Papua Papua

Papo Labala.

Papo Labala.

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.

That's Bob Orellano.

He's a professor at Southern Oregon University.

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

Yeah, he looked very intense.

He was cocky and confident and just charismatic.

Super tall.

Skinny.

Yeah, he always wore an American flat.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Like a bandana.

He usually

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

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.

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

a a flat, you know, stay flat.

And when he's coming

on his head,

yeah, my father, my father going down,

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

Yeah, me paramio second,

y Le Dijo Papo, tutas logo.

Are you crazy?

Taking you flat out

of your head.

Papo say, Why?

Why?

And everyone outside the building,

silence

Papo was

a weird guy.

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.

Father is an alcoholic.

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.

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

What happened was that in 1989, I think 1990, 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 80s, Cuban soldiers start coming back home.

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

HIV positive.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

They just locked you up?

Yeah.

And I remember

I remember one day I was talking to him.

Papo and his wife.

Papo said, Look,

I want to live free.

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

They are doing a lot of things to me.

I'm going to do a lot of things to them.

And

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

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

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

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

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

death and papo says to me

death is a door

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

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

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

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Hey, I'm Jada Bumra.

This is Radiolab.

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

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.

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?

I think

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

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.

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

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

And can you describe that place?

Like, what did he find?

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

Really?

It's full of palm trees,

very green, very lush.

farm animals roaming in.

Huh.

And you went there?

Yes, yes, I was there.

I was there, and there are still farm animals.

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

It's like kind of an idyllic place.

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

Giuse

and his wife, Johanna.

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.

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

Yeah.

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.

Metallica would be coming out of the next house.

No kidding.

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

Wait, but why?

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

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

But in the late 80s, early 90s, 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.

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

Yeah.

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

No police would have.

Power they didn't have before.

Vladi told me this story.

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

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.

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

gering.

A syringe.

A syringe full of blood.

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

And said, you want to come to me?

Come in.

Came to me.

And they were afraid of that.

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.

Hard economic times in Cuba.

The government today tightened bread rationing and raised egg prices.

It blamed delays in Soviet shipments to Cuba.

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

That meant long lines for bread.

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

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

That was the big crisis, you know,

If you were in the sanatorium,

you were fine.

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

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

Yes, I'm not going to be harassed.

Yes, I'm free.

And yes, I also get meals.

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

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 Cespes, 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 didn't inject themselves 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 that gets formed it's called vellache 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 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.

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 a tape of Herson and Joandra saying that it got to be so fashionable that

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

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

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

It's like the fact that it went from 10 or 20 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.

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.

We're gonna find a cure for this.

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

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

According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinardel 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,

Papu says that in two years,

about 18 people died.

And they started seeing how you died.

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

No, you transform yourself.

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

You know how AIDS works.

Seeing that, they started thinking about what they did.

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

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

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.

How about Papo?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 till the early morning.

But I'm like,

this is my life.

So he was sort of defiant to the end.

Yeah.

And a few months later, according to Gurson,

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.

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

And maybe fierce, also.

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

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.

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

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

Um,

it must have,

It must have.

Here's how Luis puts it.

Not even five years after Papo died,

things did start to shift in Cuba.

Make of it what you will, but December 8th, 2000, Castro unveils the statue of John Lennon.

That same year,

Bob Ariano 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.

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

And

everyone sang along.

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 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.

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 Malecón, 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.

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.

Okay, so it's Letif here again.

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

So here it is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We were so excited to collaborate with them back in 2015.

And thank you to Daniel Alarcone for making that collaboration possible.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Thank you for listening.

Hi, I'm Marcela and I'm from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

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Credit Lab was created by Dad Avomrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

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Oh, watch your step.

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