“One of the achievements, among many others, that the Center had, was that it was achieved, when I was chairing the Center, and there was María Conellas, a great fighter of the Center, we achieved to establish with the American Embassy the departure of many Cuban families that they were here and that they could not leave for the United States, and we managed to get, if I remember correctly, around 600 families to the United States. From that conversation we had with the Embassy. It was a tremendous achievement. What about that achievement? That a large part of those people who went there were members of the Cuban Center, and the Cuban Center found itself without income, and there began a very difficult stage economically for the Cuban Center, which was left a bit weak.”
“We left [Cuba], and my mother and my wife's parents were not let out in reprisal until eight years later. And that thanks to Mariano Sambriz, from the Spanish Embassy, who was the one who managed to get my mother, my mother’s sister and my wife's mother and father out, and they managed to came as repatriated. It was Mariano Sambriz who did it. And when my mother arrived here in Spain, she arrived with the spirit she had of seeing her children and her grandchildren, because she had a very advanced cancer. She only lasted 28 days. As soon as she arrived and because of the condition she came with. Higinio González Mayo, who I have already mentioned, I was already working with him, with the whiskey and so, he provided us with money to hire a great surgeon to do the surgery to her, and they opened his belly, and nothing could be done, they closed it again because there was no remedy. She lasted us 28 days since it arrived. Three hours before he passed away, he was in our bed, and there was a bunk next to it because we had it to host Cubans who came from there, and my mother, three hours before she passed away, was making jokes to her grandchildren. That's why sometimes when I speak a joke, a joke, I say that I inherited it from my mother, it is nothing else, I have to be happy with it, it's like that”
“Jesús Cor and I were in charge of the maintenance of the automatic machines, both the refrigeration and the automation, which you would toss the coin and give you the bottle, there were several models. As there were machines also installed in schools, institutions, military centres, there were also machines in El Morro and La Cabaña. They told you that you had to go see a machine that was not working in La Cabaña, and you had to go to La Cabaña to fix that machine. You got there, you went with your tools and so on. You were going through some quite gloomy corridors, and in those corridors is where you heard, in the dungeons, I think, I never visited those dungeons, but I heard those cries of 'Viva Cristo Rey', of 'Viva Cuba libre' at more than one occasion. Each time when you passed by you heard those screams and bursts of gunfire, and it was evident that a person had been shot.”
“I started working in a cafeteria-restaurant that was right in front of the Audiencia de la Habana [current Palace of Justice]. The owners of that cafeteria were Anxo Ramón and Amancio García, Asturians, from a village near where my mother lived. Well, I was working there, we did the work of a cafeteria-restaurant, and we had to go to serve breakfast to the Audiencia, the Prosecutor's Office and the courts. That was exactly where Fidel Castro arrived, he put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘Flaco’ [Skinny], I said "What’s up, Fidel" and we had some small talk, and he said ‘well, you know.’ He was wearing his impeccable white guayabera, and he was well groomed, but he had a German Ruger [pistol] on his waist, and he wanted me or a colleague to keep it in a warehouse at the back, because he could not enter the Audiencia with a gun, and then it was kept there. Some of us said that the reason of this was because he could not enter the Audiencia with firearms, others said that he belonged to a mafia and apparently, he was, but I cannot assure that. I leave it as a question mark.”
Jesús Carrasco González was born in Havana, Cuba, on April 6 of 1932, and remembers a happy childhood and adolescence in the Cerro neighborhood. There he began to work as a youngster in a tobacco store and later in a restaurant in front of the Audiencia of Havana [today the Palace of Justice]. It is here that he briefly met Fidel Castro before the Revolution. Later he took a job at the Coca-Cola company as a maintenance manager for the soft drink vending machines. In 1961, he had to leave Cuba hastily with his family after learning that the G2 signed him for providing support to members of the Second National Front of Escambray [SFNE]. Although their relatives in Spain received them with great affection, the first years in Asturias were very hard. In Madrid, he participated very actively in the Cuban Center of Spain activities, which he chaired for four years and from which he gave help to numerous Cuban families exiled in Spain.
