After being exiled for 11 months in Mexico, Porno Para Ricardo frontman Gorki Águila returned to Cuba yesterday (March 3) amidst fears of government reprisals, according to a press release issued on his website. Águila's return to Havana coincides with human rights tensions on the island due to the recent death of jailed Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo. Labeled a "prisoner of conscience" by Amnesty International, Zapata Tamayo had been on hunger strike since December 3 in protest of his detention and left to languish in a Cuban prison. Águila, the most brazenly outspoken musician on the island, is no stranger to Cuban prisons. In the last six years the 41-year-old punk rocker has been thrown behind bars three times and served a prison sentence for essentially writing and performing music that questions, denounces, and even mocks Fidel and Raul Castro's totalitarian regime. Porno Para Ricardo has done the unthinkable in Cuba--loudly and scathingly criticized what they view as the Castro brothers' failed revolution. Aguila was last arrested in August 2009 without a warrant and booked on obscure charges known as "social dangerousness" and "subverting Communist morality.'' The former anticipates a crime before it's ever committed and carries a sentence of one to four years in prison. The ballsy rocker had been putting the final touches on the band's fifth album, 'Disco Rojo Desteñido' (Faded Red Album), and blamed his arrest on the government's culture of intimidation. In the end, perhaps due to worldwide press coverage, Águila was let off with a fine, and has lived with family members in Mexico since then.
Porno Para Ricardo was formed in 1999 and has recorded all of their album's in a makeshift studio in Águila's father's apartment. With the help of a network of friends in Cuba and abroad the homemade discs are distributed like contraband and sold on the Internet, under the band's own label, La Paja Records. Not to be confused with protest music in the traditional sense, Águila is profanely irreverent and raucous. Visually, the band breaks all the rules of social conformity valued by communism by desecrating its valued tenets, paradigms and particularly the heroes of the Cuban revolution. Águila has been known for smashing Soviet-era guitars while performing in the nude. In a country bombarded with propaganda, Porno Para Ricardo has appropriated the nation's grand narratives and reduced them to laughable parodies. The Hammer and Sickle is substituted with male and female genitalia as the band's official logo, while Águila openly wears t-shirts bearing his personal political slogans. One refers to 1959, the year in which Fidel Castro seized power, as "The Year of the Mistake."
