Juan Carlos González Leiva

"Well, look, I can tell you, I have looked for many problems myself, sometimes even with my family, with people from the Church, with opponents, with the Government, for expressing my opinions very freely. In Cuba, there is a a saying: 'you should call bread as bread, and wine as wine', and I am characterized by being very drastic when it comes to expressing opinions, like right now. José Martí said: ‘The ambition of men is higher than the stars.’ I believe that many times those who are responsible for a system, even the communist one, are the ambitions of the human beings, of the men. There are rich people, I am not saying they are all, but Jesus Christ said that ‘it is more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than to pass a rope through a needle’. I believe that there are very generous people, who are people with a lot of money, their money is fair, and they deserve to have it and who are very humanitarian people, I know them, I have friends who are like that. I have seen the generosity of Santiago Álvarez, and many other people. But collective ambition does a lot of damage, as in the case of Venezuela, where there was a lot of oil, a lot of wealth, and there are many people without recourse, poor, due to bad distribution and due to bad administration, etc. I do not know, I might be wrong, because I do not have all the information about what is happening in the world, nor can I issue an absolute criterion on this subject. It seems to me that if the people who run a free and democratic country took a little more care of poverty, I think it would be difficult for communism to prosper. Communism is, as it is written in the books, a gospel without God, communism has some very cruel things that disable it and incapacitate it as a system. In fact, for being a tyranny of law, for gagging the human being, there is no longer anything that can be said of good. José Martí used to talk about a star, and when Martí refers to the star, he is talking about something that enlightens, like the one that enlightened the Kings to lead them to Jesus Christ. Of something that guides, of something that is positive, which is enlightening. Martí said: ‘Embrace the star that illuminates and saves, not the one that gets growing and finally it kills you.’ In this case, communism is like a killing star.”

“We were in Havana from 2007 to 2013, and we had extensive collaboration with foreign embassies. We received Czech brothers from 'People in Need' [non-profit organization in the Czech Republic] and other institutions there. We were able to do an amazing job. We set up a recording center, we put tape recorders, we put computers. We had an information center, with six activists working day and night. We were able to give a huge boost to civil society, because we helped the Ladies in White [Damas en Blanco] to get public, we supported the families of political prisoners almost throughout the country. We created other organizations, political parties, press agencies, we did a huge job so big so big that State Security physically eliminated the owner of the house [where we resided]. They gave him substances through a friend, who was a communist who said that she was a communist like 'Che' [Ernesto Che Guevara]. She gave him certain things to drink, and although I warned him, he ignored me. These substances caused him cirrhosis of the liver and eliminated him in a matter of three months. He was threatened with death by State Security, he was an English teacher, blind like me. They killed him, I was able to verify that they killed him. He did not drink alcoholic beverages, he did not take any medication. They physically eliminated him as they had threatened him, and forced me to leave Havana to Ciego de Ávila, where I still live.”