Andrés Manuel Guelmes Cedeño

“I remember that there was a police officer, a policeman, and people lined up to buy beer and the police was throwing down their bottles and giving them hits with sticks. And I looked at that and said that day to me: but why? Look, they talked about Batista and they were worse than the Batista’s army. And I went, there was a woman who grabbed me from behind, and I tried to take her off, and immediately two police assistants caught me and said: ‘What did you say?’ I said: That they seem just like simple regime’s helpers. And for that, I was fined too. For saying that they were regime’s helpers, because I was seeing how they gave hits to the people who were queuing, and they threw their beer bottles. In that time, the repression had increased, and I saw a lot of abuse against the people. That helped me a lot later in my career, to realize that there was a need for why to fight for a free Cuba.”

“Many people gathered in front of my house and shouted slogan, I remember that they said: ‘Ding, dong, out, down with the worm.’ They shouted the slogan of ‘Long live Fidel’, ‘Down with the worms’, ‘The blots’, and my house was frank about that because I remember that I wanted, as a child, in the end, to open the door, to see what happened, and my mother told me: ‘Andrés, don't open the door, they're going to throw eggs.’ Then I saw my mother crying, cleaning the walls of the boards like that of the house that were stained with eggs; they threw eggs, because we had wanted to leave the country and we thought differently.”