Last month, to mark World Poetry Day .on 21 March, PEN launched a campaign for Duannis Dabel León Taboada, a young Cuban poet currently serving a fourteen-year prison sentence. Aged just twenty-two years old, León Taboada was one of thousands arrested for participating in the 11 July 2021 protests (also known as 11J). He was convicted of ‘sedition’, a charge widely used to punish those who express dissent. He is detained at Combinado del Este prison in Havana, where he has endured violence, inadequate conditions and a lack of proper medical care – raising serious concerns about his wellbeing.

PEN has shared an extract from León Taboada’s poem ‘Awakening’:

This clash of thoughts
dims the senses
and the soul’s future breath.
It’s your choice to grow your awareness.
To save the fragile weight
of temptation’s delicate hold,
the bend within the crystal lens
a brittle glass of our modern age.
We are what no eye can grasp.
Root yourself to save life’s core.

(from the Despertar Tetralogy in the unpublished collection Poemas, currently being edited under the Veril imprint of the Observatorio de Derechos Culturales).

His case reflects the entrenched repression of writers and artists in Cuba, where the Communist Party has maintained tight control over cultural and political life since the 1959