Diana Caridad Ángel Bello Álvarez

“That is one of the reasons why nowadays the Cuban nation behaves like sheep, like rams, thus simply submissive, because they [the Government] have been creating laws and resolutions. And the people cannot do this and cannot do that, until, of course, the people themselves feel their self-esteem very low. You feel the pressure on you, and in the end, you simply think that you cannot do anything. And that is how the Cubans in Cuba live, with that feeling that they cannot fight, that they cannot do anything, they cannot think, they cannot live and that they cannot choose. I think they [the Government] have it very well thought out. This Cuban dictatorship knows what it is doing. They know that with these laws they will keep the people meek and without protesting. And that is how the government kept on remaining for the past 61 years.”

“At that time, as our case was so well known in the city of Ciego de Ávila, the teachers looked at me differently, they treated me differently, the same with my sister, with my cousins. In fact, my uncle decided to leave the town because of how frustrated he was and how bad the people made us feel. Then in the school meetings, they invited my parents to attend, they let them know. My aunt who worked in the CDR [Committees for the Defense of the Revolution], which is a state organization, and during those meetings they touched this topic constantly, because, I think, they often do it on purpose to make people feel bad because of their way of acting and thinking. And over the years it continued hurting me, because once I tried to enter the Caracol stores to work as a shop assistant and I was still dragging myself with what happened to us.”

“I began to see my life in a different way because we were more observed by the people. We drew more attention, they pointed their fingers at us, at what I call communist bullying, because everywhere, they point to you as if you were the worm [common denomination of the counter-revolutionaries], the mercenary, the one who does not have the ideology that it is necessary to have because everything is designed so that you have to think and act in a way and as we were not like that, because I grew up seeing things from another point of view. There are people who have to leave [the country] to realize what is happening in Cuba. I already knew what was happening from the inside. I knew that it was not a system in which a person should live, because of the repression and indoctrination to which you are subjected.”