Spanish actor Willy Toledo announced last week that he will move to Havana in an interview with Venezuela's teleSUR channel. Shortly after expressing his admiration for the late "comandante [Hugo] Chávez", Toledo said that "in May, I'm going to go live in Havana", adding that "it's exciting to me, coming from Europe, where we're all victims of savage capitalism", to come to Latin America and see humanistic processes that have improved peoples' lives". Toledo went on to defend the education and public health systems in Cuba and called his native Spain a "privatizer of fundamental rights and of suicides". In 2011, Spain granted 700 Cubans the status of political refugees, according to El Pais.
Toledo, who is best known for his roles in comedies "El otro lado de la cama" ("The Other Side of the Bed"), "7 vidas" ("Seven Lives") and "Crimen ferpecto" ("The Ferpect Crime"), has long been vocal about his political opinions. When the Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died in 2010 after an 85-day hunger strike, Toledo called him a "common criminal" and said that dissidents in the Communist island nation were "people who have committed terrorist acts against the Cuban government, acts of sedition against their country and a ton of crimes".
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El Pais reported that Toledo has previously given his basic ideal plan of government as, "nationalize the bank, ration the resources and establish a democratic police force." The actor has also weighed in on figures like King Juan Carlos, criminal court judge Baltasar Garzón, and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy - for Toledo, the king is a "commercial agent of big multinational companies", Garzón "two-faced", and Rajoy a "National Catholic fascist and heir of Francoism". He has also criticized the war in Afghanistan in similarly unequivocal terms, saying that Spanish soldiers there "aren't doing any kind of humanitarian service, that's absolutely false, they're there killing Afghan civilians".
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The actor has been come under fire for his comments from figures as prominent as Esperanza Aguirre, the former president of Madrid as part of the city's People's Party, who asked him to visit prisons on the island. Much of the response he has triggered among opposing circles, however, has been ironic rather than wrathful, especially on media platforms like Twitter. Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, a blogger from Havana, wrote in an article in El Diario de Cuba, "The Cold War rhetoric of Willy Toledo is as amusing as his lending his unshaven face to the 2007 Christmas campaign of the World of Warcraft videogame."
It is as yet unclear if the actor intends to make Havana his permanent or temporary residence.
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