Pablo Hasél didn’t want to go to prison. But by 2018, the Catalan rapper had ruffled the coiffed feathers of the Spanish monarchy with unapologetic, rebellious music denouncing perceived injustice — so much so that he’d been handed a two-year prison sentence by Spain‘s National Court. Although an appeals judge reduced the term to nine months, Hasél still didn’t think it was right. Neither did a lot of people in Spain.
The sentence — for a song, music video, and 64 tweets — was partially for “injurias a la Corona,” or insulting and slandering the monarchy. The song for which Hasél is imprisoned is titled “Juan Carlos el Bobón,” (“Juan Carlos the Idiot”) a play on the former king’s surname, Juan Carlos de Borbón. “Juan Carlos the idiot, mafia boss plundering the Spanish kingdom,” Hasél raps in Spanish on the chorus. “On TV they say he’s useful — of course, to his dealer and the brothel owner. Juan Carlos the idiot, the revolution will overtake his palace.”
The song nods to an incident from 2012: Juan Carlos — who was the king of Spain from November 1975 until he abdicated to his son, Felipe VI, in June 2014 — went to Botswana on a $60,000 elephant hunt, in the midst of a severe economic crisis in Spain. A German-Danish business consultant, with whom Juan Carlos was having an affair, joined him on the trip. Two months later, Juan Carlos sent €65 million to her private bank account. (This year, for context, the Spanish royal family is slated to receive €8,431,150 from the country’s budget.)
The rest of Hasél’s sentence was for insulting and slandering state institutions, like police, and “glorifying terrorism” in his lyrics and tweets. It was suspended — as long as Hasél didn’t commit a second offense. But he kept rapping, so on Jan. 28, 2021, they gave him 10 days to turn himself in. He refused, and the walls began to close around him.
On Feb. 6, hundreds of people gathered in Madrid to reject the conviction, calling it censorship. On Feb. 12, Hasél released the protest song “Ni Felipe VI,” which begins with a clip of the king of Spain, King Felipe VI, saying that “there is no doubt that, without freedom of expression and information, there is no democracy.”
Four days later, to avoid arrest, Hasél and around 20 supporters had barricaded themselves inside of the rectorate at the University of Lleida. The demonstrators emptied fire extinguishers, filling the air with haze. At 8:25 a.m. on Feb. 16, 2021, dozens of riot-clad police officers arrested Hasél — and lit the fuse on a powder keg. “This fascist government won’t stop us,” Hasél told press cameras as they took him away. “They won’t defeat us with their repression!” “You can’t take all the Pablos!” shouted the supporters. Every night for a week, thousands of protestors took to the streets in cities around Spain, pushing back against the arrest — and the lèse-majesté and anti-terrorism laws infringing upon freedom of speech.
Born Pablo Rivadulla Duró, Hasél, 36, is from Lleida, within Catalonia, a region known for its independence movement, home to a tapestry of leftist ideologies: Marxist, anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist. At 10, he learned about rap from a TV movie, went out and bought an N.W.A. record, brought it straight home to the mini hi-fi, and fell in love.
By 16, he had recorded his first song, and soon he was uploading them online. He made indignant music that decried the continued existence and corruption in the Spanish monarchy, and accused the police of torturing and killing protestors and migrants, among other things. Not many people listened to his songs at first, but the music was radical, and the state was paying attention.
When Hasél was arrested, there were riots, fires, Molotov cocktails, and clashes with the police. Now, four years into a six-year-two-month prison sentence, the news cycle has ended. The noise has died down, for the most part — although Hasél’s supporters have planned a “Song for Freedom” event outside of the penitentiary on the fourth anniversary of his imprisonment. (Hasél went to prison exclusively because of his lyrics and tweets. Other convictions, including for assault of a journalist, obstruction of justice, and threats toward a witness in a trial, were added while he was already there.)
A few caveats arise often in conversations about Hasél: He’s a rapper, but not really part of the rap scene, more so of the activist community. Advocates support his right to freedom of expression but may not always agree with all of his politics. Francisco García Tapia is a volunteer at No Callarem, a Catalan organization that fights for freedom of speech and expression in the arts. Not everyone likes Hasél’s music, but “it doesn’t matter if you like the music or not,” Tapia says in Catalan. “If you believe in human rights and freedom of speech, you have to defend him.”
Hasél has become a lightning rod that has rallied people across Spain. In 2021, days before his arrest, more than 200 figures from the world of arts and culture — including actor Javier Bardem, filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, and musician Joan Manuel Serrat — signed a petition to support Hasél and condemn restrictions on “ideological and artistic freedom.” “The persecution of rappers, tweeters, journalists, as well as other representatives of culture and art, for trying to exercise their right to freedom of expression has become a constant,” the petition said in Spanish. “The imprisonment of Pablo Hasél makes the sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads of all public figures who dare to publicly criticize the actions of any of the state institutions even more evident.”
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The petition notes that Spain had been creeping up the list of countries that have retaliated against artists for the content of their songs. In 2019, 71 artists were imprisoned in 16 countries — including 14 sentenced to prison in Spain, more than any other country recorded that year. This is according to FreeMuse, an independent, international NGO that consults with the UN and UNESCO. The number has since trended downward, and Freemuse notes that campaigns to free imprisoned artists have been quite effective. (In 2021, the artist C. Tangana partnered with Amnesty International Spain to encourage people to try to reform the penal code.)
Since his arrest, Hasél has exhausted all of his appeals in Spain and turned to the European Court of Human Rights, which declared his application inadmissible in November 2023. Amnesty International criticized the decision, saying: “Vague offenses such as ‘glorification’ or ‘apology’ of terrorism should be repealed. They give states the power to criminalize a wide range of expression that does not meet the high threshold of direct incitement to a serious criminal offence with the intent that such an offence will be committed, and with a clear causal link between the speech and the likelihood of the commission of such an offence.” (One of the tweets for which Hasél was convicted, for instance, was: “Protests are necessary but not sufficient, let’s support those who have gone further,” paired with a photo of Victoria Gómez, a member of the group Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre (GRAPO), designated as a terrorist organization by the EU.)
Meanwhile, Hasél has kept speaking out: Last year, on the third anniversary of his imprisonment, Say It Loud Records and Albert Marquès released “Open Letter to Pablo Hasél.” A continued collaboration between Marquès, a jazz pianist and New York City public school teacher, and Brooklyn-raised rapper Samuel Omare, the song and music video incorporate audio recordings of Hasél’s statements during his trial at the Spanish National Court. (Marquès’ Ampl!fy Voices project — which makes music with people impacted by censorship and state-sponsored violence — often records phone calls with incarcerated people to incorporate their voices, but that was impossible in Hasél’s case.)
A few days after its release, the “Open Letter to Pablo Hasél” music video was shown at the IrídiaFest human rights and culture festival in Barcelona. The reaction has been mixed. On one side of the pond, Spain, terrorist attacks, like those by the armed Basque nationalist and far-left separatist group E.T.A., still feel fresh. So the “exalting terrorism” or “apology for terrorism” law under which Hasél was charged is a sensitive spot, and some of the response to the song has been hostile. On the other side, in the U.S., where the First Amendment is the law of the land and lèse-majesté laws are unheard of, people seemed to like it, Marquès says.
From prison, Hasél answered a set of written questions from Rolling Stone: “This movement goes far beyond my freedom; it is for collective freedom,” he said. “They have imprisoned me to scare the rest, in addition to trying to silence me and change my protest. Freedom of expression is fundamental, and is linked to other rights and freedoms. There is not even minimal democracy here if they imprison us for denouncing even proven facts. What I have explained about the monarchy, police abuses, political prisoners or other institutions, has been proven not to be an ‘injury,’ as they say.”
The conditions for Spain’s climate of repression began brewing in the 2000s. In a 2022 documentary from No Callarem, Mallorcan rapper Valtònyc posits that the Spanish financial crisis of 2008-2014 brought with it a political crisis as well. The Indignados Movement, or anti-austerity movement, of 2011-2015 protested austerity cuts, high unemployment rates, welfare cuts, capitalism, and corruption. At one point, thousands of demonstrators surrounded the Spanish Parliament in Madrid. Then, in 2015, came the Citizen Security Law, commonly known as the Ley Mordaza, or gag law.
Ostensibly intended to increase public safety, the Ley Mordaza cracked down on unauthorized gatherings around Parliament and videotaping police. It set fines of €600 for insulting a police officer, up to €30,000 for sharing damaging photos of police, and €600,000 for participating in unauthorized protests outside of Parliament.
Fernando Paniagua de Paz volunteers at No Callarem alongside Tapia, which they’ve both done since early 2017. “It was a more general struggle in Spain about freedom of speech, and Pablo and Valtònyc and the others were the ones who are going to pay, with this idea of the shock doctrine,” Paniagua de Paz says. “You need to hit very strong, maybe someone that is not really very famous and very well-known, that you can hit very strong and the others will be scared.”
Protesters in the streets of Barcelona with clashes against police, against the imprisonment order of rap singer Pablo Hasel, who will have to go to prison to sing against the Spanish monarchy. In Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain on January 31, 2021.
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The music video for “Open Letter to Pablo Hasél” references 14 rappers who have become targets of legal scrutiny in Spain: Hasél; Valtònyc (Jose Miguel Arenas), who fled into exile in Belgium; and the 12 members of the rap group La Insurgencia. No Callarem’s documentary, titled “No callarem: un film per la llibertat” (“We won’t shut up: a film for freedom”), follows Hasél, Valtònyc, and Elgio (Alex Nicolaev), a member of La Insurgencia, to illustrate the threats to freedom of expression facing artists in Spain.
So when Marquès performed a Freedom First concert — a collaboration between himself and the writer Keith LaMar, who calls in live from death row in Ohio to recite his work — at the inaugural IrídiaFest in 2023, it caught No Callarem’s eye. They asked if he might be able to do something similar with Hasél. Marquès met with the rapper in a half-hour visit in the Penitentiary Center of Ponent in Lleida, and came away with the impression that the rapper was a prisoner of conscience. “He has been portrayed also just as an activist, trying to remove the artist side of him, and that’s simply not true,” Marquès says.
Since Hasél is barred from the prison’s recording studio, the production team incorporated clips of his statements during his 2018 trial at the Spanish National Court instead. “It’s not my fault that the king wastes public money on hunting trips in Africa, or that he bought off his mistresses to stay silent with public money,” Hasél said in Spanish. “I’m not guilty of those things. I simply explain them, just like a lot of the media has. If you have to put every journalist who has reported on this in prison, you wouldn’t have enough jails. And these are objective facts, regardless of whether you’re a Republican or a Royalist.”
“If I could talk to one of these judges that sentenced Pablo Hasél, I would start by giving them a music history class,” Marquès says. “The purpose of this music is to go too far. … It’s like telling the singer of Dead Kennedys or Sex Pistols, … ‘Can you say the same thing, but politely?’ That doesn’t make any sense. It’s what you say and how you say it. And there will always be an art form that is insulting towards whatever status quo is established. … That’s the purpose of this music, and I hope that by doing this connection with New York, we also remind everybody where it comes from.”
Samuel Omare, the rapper featured on “Open Letter to Pablo Hasél,” makes sure to remember that hip-hop came from the Bronx. It started out, he said, as people having fun: MCs keeping the energy up while the DJ was running records at house parties. As it evolved, though, it became a medium through which artists could discuss the world around them. For Omare, that brought to mind “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, known for its “broken glass everywhere” line and depiction of urban poverty.
In the No Callarem documentary, Hasél echoes a similar sentiment in a letter from April 2021, written from prison to a friend: “As a kid, I asked myself why there are so many huge inequalities. One day, I was biking in the country and I saw a bunch of shacks in awful conditions. I remember that setting a before and after. The first rap lyrics I rapped to a part of my class, I remember saying: ‘So much injustice drives me to despair.’ It was clear, though I didn’t know about political rap, that I wanted to talk about real life in my music and condemn injustice.”
Omare pointed out that recently hip-hop in the U.S. has been under a microscope. Rap lyrics like Young Thug’s have been used in court here, too, so “this just resonated very, very, very, very, very deeply for me, because I think, if you can police it over there, what’s to say [something similar couldn’t happen here?]” Omare says.
The title of “Open Letter to Pablo Hasél” drew inspiration from “Open Letter to Duke,” a tribute to Duke Ellington by Charles Mingus, Omare’s favorite jazz musician. “It’s kind of like having a conversation,” he says. “Here’s my chance to write to you and just tell you to keep your head up. And the story is still gonna unfold, the story isn’t finished yet.”
Feb. 12 will mark a year since “Open Letter to Pablo Hasél” was released, and Feb. 16 will mark four years since Hasél’s arrest, with three years and two months left in his sentence. When the song was released, some Spaniards told Marquès that they didn’t even realize he was still in prison. Unfortunately, Marquès says, prisons excel at making the public forget about people. But the goal of the song is to remind them that Hasél is still here, still incarcerated — and to introduce him — and the fight for freedom of expression in Spain — to an international audience.
“We urgently need to unite to defend our rights and freedoms — where there are more of them, to expand them, and not to allow the existing ones to be taken away,” Hasél writes to Rolling Stone. “Here, where there are such serious violations — even with something as basic as freedom of expression — we still need all kinds of support even more.”
