Los Frikis

Los Frikis was a punk subculture that originated in the 1980s in Cuba, drawing together young people alienated from official Cuban society who were attracted to heavy metal, punk, and other counter-cultural music and aesthetics. In the economically desperate years of the early 1990s — Cuba's Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union — some Frikis made the extraordinary decision to knowingly inject HIV-positive blood into themselves.

Their motivations were complex: a desire for community in Cuba's sanitoria, where infected people were quarantined; economic survival with free food and medicine; and a form of protest against a state that they felt had excluded them.