Radiolab - Los Frikis

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

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.  Reporter Luis Trelles brings 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. We originally released this episode back in 2015 in a collaboration with Radio Ambulante, but the story is so fascinating (and, in many ways, still relevant) that we haven’t stopped thinking about it. Special thanks to the bands VIH, Eskoria, Metamorfosis and Alio Die & Mariolina Zitta for the use of their music. Radio Ambulante launches their 15th season on September 30th!!Check it out, here!! (https://radioambulante.org/en) EPISODE CITATIONS:Find some of Radio Ambulante’s other stories about the Frikis here -The Survivors (https://zpr.io/Kh8KWWi6SqaF)When Havana was Friki (https://zpr.io/HrXsgibzvbJj)Please put any supporting materials you think our audience would find interesting or useful below in the appropriate broad categories.Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radio Lab. 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 taste in music, by the way, they decided to do something extreme. They decided to escape the 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 to be. 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.

Freakies. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab.

From W-N-Y-S-C-C-C-E. Rewind. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Brad. 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 Traus.

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 Sabios, who is a filmmaker himself, a 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? Okay, we're recording. Yes, it's Vladimir. Vladimir, how are 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, 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 50 years, 53 years, since the United States, you know, broke the relationship with diplomatic relationship with QL, and nothing happened in QL. You know, everything is the same. Now, everything is going to change. Today, a collaboration with a fantastic program,

Radio Ambulante, Luis Treas comes to us from them. This is a story that predates the stuff you've been hearing 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 Treas told us about it, we almost couldn't believe. So the reason we called up, Vladie,

is that we wanted to hear the backstory of all of this. Well, I was born in Pinad de 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 news that the government wanted 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

Frosha. Viva. La Union Sovietica. It was the big country in the world, the big economy, and everything that we would hope is to be like then. Yeah. It was a given that he would get in line

every year to get his toy. You know, I 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 church 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 Led Zeppelin. I remember that day.

I remember like a... Do you remember what Led Zeppelin song it was? Kashmir. Kashmir. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Kashmir. It was my first time that I hear. rock-and-brough music.

How did it make you feel when you heard Kashmir? Well, different. You know, you see Robert playing, and you see Jimmy Page with those long hair and the move that they had. And the thing that they said, 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 to freaky. I went to freaky. What is freaky? So freaky's are what Cubans call the most extreme metalheads, hard rock punk rockers.

We started 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 or 20 years old, my father gave me a Russian radio, and he 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 Rolling Stone, sympathy with the devil.

Hello, baby. Hello, babe. Say me here. Man, man. Barry Manelow, we were excited to listen Barry Marlowe. After that, I didn't like it, not? 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, Laddy'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 opened 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, Socialism, or death. His slogan is painted freshly all over Havana, socialism or death. Suddenly, music you listened 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. That's like that, boom. In school, they'd often cut your hair against your will.

It was abuse. And just to jump in, this is the point in the story where things take a very, no other way to see. say it, a very punk rock turn. Because into this cultural war... Steps a guy named... Papo. Papo. Papo La Bala.

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. 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 current.

Cobain of the Freakies. Yeah, he looked very intense. He was cocky and confident and just charismatic. Super tall. Skinny? Yeah. He always wear an American flat.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Like a bandana. He usually... Those are two friends of Pappos, Jesus and Luis Hernandez, who was also a bad maid of his. I remember that one of his... When he came to visit me to my house,

where he lived... So, Luis remembers the first. first time he met Papu, and it was on a night that a communist party meeting was taking place right outside his house. Outside the building, and when Papa is coming, he's coming in a bicycle, and his head is a flat, the United States flat. And when he's coming... On his head? Yeah, My father, my father going down. His seconded. Your father hit when he saw him

coming with the American flag on his head. Yeah, my father my son was in the balcony and he said, Papo, you're too, you're crazy? Taking you flat out of your head. And Papa said, why? Why? And everyone outside the building,

silence. Papa was, it was a weird guy. You can see video of Papo because Vladimir because Vladimir shot a documentary in 1994 where he interviewed Papo and some of the other freckies. And in that documentary, Papo talks about growing up poor. Father is an alcoholic. Mother abandoned.

By age 14, he's a little bit of what we love him in Rhyra. By age 14, he's a little. 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, in 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 war. They went to your apartment. They went to the school.

They went to everybody. Wow. I remember. They went to my war. 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. Give me your blood. Bladdy says they would come in, take your blood, and if they found that you were positive... The police came, put you in the police car, go straight to the sanatorium. They just locked you up. Yeah. And I remember...

I remember one day I was talking to him. Papo and his wife. Papa said, look, I don't want to live here in this system that he's taking to where he's... 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. Papa told him I met up with these other rockers. They were HIV positive. And I went and took a syringe, grew some blood from their arm, and I put the needle in my own arm.

And I get myself with HIV. I get myself with blood, contaminated with HIV, you know. And I look at him and 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. That's crazy, though. It was crazy.

He knew for sure that when he did that, that he, that was a death sentence? For him, yes. He knows. Vladimir's not quite sure that the others that came after Papo really knew what they were doing, but Papo knew. Remember, he said socialism? Socialism or death? And he said 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. Hey, I'm Chad, I boomrod. This is Radio Lab. Yes, one, two, one two, mic check. That's Luis Treas of Radio Ambalante. 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, dude named Papo, to inject himself with HIV. Would you call the protest?

I think Papa 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 Kester 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 Pinad 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 over there. Actually, they would roam in as 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, Gerson Goubea and his wife, Yohandra. 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. Gerson and Joanne 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. There's of all.

Nirvana. Tengo Metallica would be coming out of the next house. No kidding. Yeah. So it was like 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 over there. A power they didn't have before. Vladdy told me this story. The patients said the sanitarium could go out every 21 days for a day trip. And some of the freaky's 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 the thing and one of them has a a syringe a syringe full of blood and Vladdy says the guy took out the blood

and waved it at the police and said you want to come to me 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 red 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 that used to get.

That meant long lines for bread. Short tempers. We were suffering. Vladimir Savayos, who never actually lived inside the sanitarium, he says that people outside were going hungry, And he himself... I was waiting like 100 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. It was the big crisis, you know, in the Clinton era. But... If you were in the sanatorium, you were fine.

Yeah, just being able to get milk and... an egg and beans. Barbariano 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 Socialism or Muete, and in it there's this bishop of Havana. In one occasion, I've had the opportunity in a scene in that coincide. His last name is Cespus, 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...

Fidel Castro, I couldn't believe it. And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell serenech anymore. They put a law that if you're injured and sell 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. warming across the island in different sanitariums. In the biggest one of the mall, in Santiago de la Vega, Los Cocos, which is like a half hour, 45 minutes south of Havana, you have the first group that gets formed. It's called VEH, which translates to HIV. But then in the center of the island, this town called Santa Clara, you had the Cuban punk band,

Escoria, and Escoria translates as scum, right? Eskoria. 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, Ke vaia la Escoria, let the scum leave.

So to call yourself Escoria, to call yourself scum, that is punk rock. And with these bands big outside the Sanatorium, too? Escoria is, I mean, you can't talk about Cuban punk without, I mean Escoria, it's 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 Johandra 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. Really? Yeah, no, there was the tape of Yoranda saying... And many rockeros, also that they'd say to the other, no, because if you not think of acid, you're not rocker, you're not rocker.

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. people I met, of thinking that, oh, eventually Fidel and those guys will find a cure. He's going to find a cure for this.

Cuba with one of the best health care systems in the Western Hemisphere. We're going to live forever. But everything starts to change when the first of them died. According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinarder 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 Vladis' documentary, which was made in 1994, Papu says that in two years, about 18 people died. And they start seeing how you die, because you don't die like a normal person when they had a hard attack, 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're starting thinking about what they did. Did kids start saying they wish they hadn't done this?

Well, when you see Vladdy's documentary and that Swedish documentary, Socialism Mweete, which was made in 1995, you definitely see the kids having deep regrets. You have one of them saying, I regret this. regretted a million times. How about Papo? Well, I don't, I never heard Papa ever question that he had done it. And in that Swedish documentary, there's a scene towards the end where you see Papu 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 Orvana 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. I'm here. Money. How are you? Oh, fine. I knew. 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 until the early morning. But I'm like, this is my life. So he was sort of defiant at the end. Yeah. And a few months later, according to coercing, Papo started to bleed out from his mouth.

And eyes. He had a parasite in his brain. He had a parasite in his brain. He became violent. And he died from that disease. So as he knew it and at the final. you wonder, 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 hard to say. 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 8, 2000, Castro unveils the statue of John Lennon. That same year, Bob Ariano and a bunch of rock musicians. Including Will Oldham, David Pahoe. 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 Papua La Bala and the Freikis. And everyone's sing 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 100 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 Malekonazzo, 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 leading the city in rafts by the thousands, by the hundreds. Castro literally had to come down to the Cuban Malekon, 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 the sort of a thousand points of light, and this is the brightest point. Right. Or the darkest point, frankly.

Right, exactly. And it's a lie to what I'm saying, I'm a bit of a bit of my life's been tired, I'm a man, and so I'm a manor, and beckonable, I prefer to keep doing what I'm going to be, I want to be an intendingable.

And although I do not intend, never change will. I like to be in a mood, Okay, so it's Latif here again. Now, the reporter who reported this story back in 2015, Luis Treyes, has an update for you from now, 2025. So here it is. Since the story first ran, Bob Ariano has continued traveling to Cuba to work with Latimer Sabios 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, Yoandra. 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 Papa La Bala. He says that in today's Cuba, Papa 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 Alarcon 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 Luis's visit to Cuba and the story of Gerson and Johandra, the last two remaining self-term. infected freakies. Thank you to Vladimir Sabayos and Bob Arellano for the use of their documentaries and to Alio Dai and the Cuban punk band's HIV and Escoria for their original music in this episode. I'm Latif Nasser. Thank you for listening. Hi, I'm Marcella and I'm from Kittaltenango,

Guatemala, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Dad Abramrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler Lulu Miller and Latif Nassar are our co-host Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna,

David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu, Niamasambandan, Matt Hilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Mason, Sarah Cary, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vitz, Aryan Wack, Pac-Walter, Molly Webster, Jessica Young. With help from Rebecca Rand, our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol Matzini, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Celeste calling from Utah. Leadership support for radio lab science programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab is provided by the Alpha. Peace Sloan Foundation.