"They gave me my freedom letter when there was a journalist who was called Barbara Walters, she was an American. She came to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro. During a press conference, she asked him, how it was possible that after the Revolution, which was for the good of humanity and of everybody, Cuba had so much youth rotting in prisons. And he said: 'Does it looks like this?' Barbara answered: 'Yeah, there's a lot of young people rotting in prisons.´ And he said: 'Look, if you want to, talk to the Yankees, and tell them that these people are definitely citizens of USA, you can pick them up and take them. I let the whole world go.’ Until she asked again if they can leave with the family and everything. He said yes. Then she asked: 'And can they take their cat with them?' 'Yes, they can also take their cat', he responded with a jocular tone. So that's what Fidel Castro said on television, and afterwards they called me to tell me that I will be free."
"There was a priest who, when he was doing mass, those criminals even stole his wallet one day, with 500 dollars, everything he had in there—his rosary, whatever it was, they took it. Then every time that man tried to talk to him—well, what a way Cubans are—he later said something to me: ‘Well, if Cuba is so good, why didn’t you stay in Cuba?’ I said, ‘Because at least in Cuba, this doesn’t happen to me. They don’t do this to me in my Cuba, because if I fight back, I fight back. And here, if I fight back, they’ll kill me.’ Because what was happening there was horrible. What those people sent through that Mariel [a port 40 km from Havana, where boats left for the United States]—there were very good people, and many went with the medical group and elderly people. But listen, when they threw in that element—the worst from the prisons—they emptied the prisons. They would go up to them and say, ‘Go on, do you want to go to the United States? Let’s go. If you don’t go, we’ll double your sentence.’ And that’s how they emptied the prisons. I haven’t been in contact with that element, because in political prison, that wasn’t a thing. You might have a disagreement with someone about something one day, but not that kind of life."
"The battle was very difficult, but we fought with courage and desire until the men were falling one by one. Some died in the combat, others were taken as prisoners to the area of “Topes de Collates County”, there the Castro’s soldiers had what was their base of torture. There were taken the prisoner by the soldiers and there they had tortured them with whatever kind of torture, physically and mentally. Psychologically in order to destroy the person. And they also had a kind of pool, where they were throwing people. They put a stone tied with a rope around their neck and said: 'You do not want to talk, let's see', and threw the prisoner into there. When they considered that he was drowning, they took him out and came back again: 'What are you going to tell me? What's new?' If they did not like the answer, they took you and shot you. Shooting happened almost always during the night. Just before the execution, the detained were shouting 'Long Live Christ the King, free Cuba, we will be free someday', and a series of [anti]communist phrases and everything else that one can say at this determinate moment. They just killed them there and buried them wrapped in nylon into a hole in the ground or in the common graves. Sometimes they took dead bodies to the village to exhibit them."
Andrea Concepción San Gil Díaz, better known to all with the diminutive of her name as Conchita, was born in 1945 in Cuba. Her parents came to Cuba from the Canary Islands and dedicated to the farming. Conchita grew up on the Petan Paro farm in the municipality of Trinidad, where she got an education focused on her homeland, not only from her parents, but also from her teacher. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Castro regime expropriated the farm in the name of agrarian reform. Conchita and her brother immediately began to organize a guerrilla in the mountains of Escambray. Between 1959 and 1963, Conchita dedicated herself to the supply, logistics and strategy of the uprising, living in stress and constant danger. During the so-called “clean-up of Escambray” the Castroists killed her two brothers, imprisoned her mother eight times and watched over her family. In August 1963 Conchita was imprisoned and subjected to interrogations and torture, including being locked in industrial refrigerators. In October 1963 she finally received a trial and they sent her to the men’s prison in Guanajay. Part of her sentence was also forced labour in several farms and factories. After the visit of the American journalist Barbara Walters in Cuba, who was challenging Fidel Castro for the fact of keeping many youths imprisoned, Conchita obtained her freedom letter. Two years after her release from prison, she managed to leave the country on a shrimp boat to Miami where she resides until nowadays. She is a widow and has four children.
