A Cuban Protest Ballad From ICE Detention

A Cuban Protest Ballad From ICE Detention

Listen if you like: Silvio Rodriguez, Los Tigres del Norte, Woody Guthrie

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Lauren Villagran was interviewing a man in ICE detention by phone when he suddenly broke into song. She sent me a message about how Nilo Gibert Arencibia, a 64-year-old Cuban dissident seeking asylum in the U.S., had written a “ballad on detention and Trump and all the rest.”

It’s a protest song, so you might expect lyrics that attack President Donald Trump, but Gibert Arencibia actually seeks common ground: “Hear me, Trump, hear me, brother,” he sings. “I am upright, I am a Christian…I’ve got balls, just like you.”

Arencibia is the latest in a long line of artists to protest their incarceration by performing over phone lines. And music has been a mainstay of resistance against Trump’s expansion of immigrant detention. The California band Los Jornaleros del Norte has played concerts from flatbed trucks outside of facilities. The online children’s star Ms. Rachel wrote a song with kids detained in Texas.

But Gibert Arencibia’s song is the first I’ve heard entirely written from inside one of these facilities. Villagran gave me the backstory about the songwriter, and our colleague, editor Manuel Torres, translated the ballad’s lyrics from Spanish to English.

Maurice: Who is Nilo Gibert Arencibia, and how did he end up in detention?

Lauren: For decades, Nilo was an activist in Cuba, protesting the communist government. His wife, Maria Arango Presibal, was a member of the famous pro-democracy group Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White). After she was stabbed during a protest, in 2014, the couple went into exile in Trinidad and Tobago. They crossed the Mexican border into Texas in 2021 and, under the Biden administration’s policies at the time, were processed and released. They later petitioned for political asylum.

By last October, they were living in upstate New York, authorized to work and holding down jobs at The Cheesecake Factory while they waited for their asylum hearing. ICE agents arrested them when they showed up for a routine check-in. Nilo’s wife was sent to a detention center in Texas, and he’s now spent about eight months at Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi.

Nilo Gibert Arencibia, right, and Maria Arango Presibal, left, are political dissidents from Cuba currently held in immigration detention, where Gibert Arencibia wrote a protest ballad. Courtesy of Carmen Arango Presibal

Maurice: And that’s where he wrote the song?

Lauren: Yes. His wife told me lyrics often come to him when he’s meditating. I’d never had an interview subject sing his testimony to me in ballad form, and it reminded me a bit of trova music, a Cuban genre known for strummed guitars and often political lyrics. But it’s also like a [Mexican] corrido in how he makes himself and his wife the heroes of their own story.

Has his wife heard the song?

She has. It’s hard between detention centers, but they talk occasionally over the phone.

What about the couple’s future?

They are fighting their detention in U.S. courts with habeas corpus petitions. Outcomes in similar cases vary widely across the country. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson cited the couple, in an email to me, as an example of how the Biden administration “recklessly unleashed millions of unvetted illegal aliens into American communities,” and said they’d remain in detention until their case is resolved. That could mean deportation to Cuba or a third country like Ecuador.

Their initial asylum claims were denied by an immigration judge, but they are appealing those decisions. Nilo specifically wants to show an American court evidence of the danger they face back in Cuba. I think he hopes this song will show how much he believes in freedom and democracy, how he fought for them back home, like many Cubans who ended up in the U.S. It really struck me how, at one point, the song is framed as being to President Trump.