Álvaro Alba

“It was a life where first of all, you did not question what was happening in the country, you had a good education, the schools had everything you needed, there was no shortage of food, the school had a pool where you recreated after having studied. Although the study was combined with work - you had to go to pick mandarins because the school was involved in a citrus plan. There were coming foreign delegations for visit to the school... On weekends, as it was a boarding school, you always had a party at the home of a classmate. Because all the students belonged to a different social class in the sense that no one there questioned whether there were political prisoners, or why so many people were leaving the country, there was never a pamphlet or book of protest which would be distributed. It was a life where the regime was accepted, where nobody questioned that there were no elections, and for the young people, life went on from party to party, in the summer going to Varadero beach to spend the holidays, or to the nearby beaches. It was an affable life, a peaceful life, without any political questioning.”

“They say that pessimists are well informed optimists. I am a pessimist. I am a pessimist because the Cuban people have atrophied. We are all marked, we are all hurt, we all suffer from a family division, we all have a dead family member, drowned in the Straits of Florida, or who spent twenty, ten, or fifteen years in jail. And it will take two or three generations for the country to reach a democracy, so that in Cuba it does not matter whether or not there is a Castro in power, so that Cuba does not fall into the hands of the drug cartels, so that in Cuba, corruption is not a fundamental sign of the economy...”

“I tried several times to start reading the Gulag Archipelago [novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]. It was difficult to read it in Russian, I still did not have... And I decided then for a piece that I thought was less difficult, which was The Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov and I was horrified. I was horrified to read it, to see the cruelty, the ruthless way in which the human being is treated within this system. And after having read The Kolyma Tales by Shalamov, it was easier for me to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But yes, it was through the knowledge of Russian and Soviet history and literature, that I could understand that the Communism in Cuba had no life, that it had no future, and that it was cruel to maintain this system.”

“Our passport was never renewed. The passports that we had as students or the passports that we had as official ones to remain in the Soviet Union had to be renewed every two years. And when you went to get it renewed, they told you no, that you had to leave the country. Personally, I wrote a letter to Eduard Shevardnaze [Foreign Minister of the USSR under the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, 1985–1991] to allow me [to remain in the Soviet Union]. There was an agreement between Havana and Moscow in the Soviet times, that to be able to live in one of these countries, you had to have the authorization of the other. That means that a Cuban person had to have Cuba’s authorization for the Soviet Union to authorize him to stay there, and a Soviet had to have Soviet authorization for Havana to allow him to stay there or live there. It didn’t matter if you had a son, daughter, wife or husband.”