“Logically, not only was my criticism increasing, but the people who began to collaborate at this stage were also much more critical of what was happening, because no one could be blind to what happened on July 11, 2021. Not only to what had led these people to take to the streets en masse, but to the way they had been repressed and what had happened around all this. It was a very strong thing. At that time, obviously, major problems around me began. That was in 2021. On October 25, 2022, it was the first time that counterintelligence sent me a summons to be interviewed. One knows that it is an interrogation full of threats. There I decide... I had always thought... They have not messed with me, I write, I try to always be respectful and clear in what I say. I do science, I am a historian and I try to use science to analyze Cuban reality. Science is not emotional, the analysis has to be strict. In this sense, many people criticized me: ‘You don’t say this to the dictatorship.’ My answer was: ‘I don’t say it, because it isn’t.’ This is worse, it is a society with totalitarian traits. Batista was a dictatorship. And at that stage civil society had enough prominence to defeat it. Why doesn’t it happen in Cuba? Saying the word dictatorship is not exactly being attached to what is really happening in Cuba. We have to study it in greater depth to have a better, more accurate appreciation of not only why we have arrived here, but also why we have not managed to avoid it and why it is so difficult for us to reverse it. If this is not being done, we are not understanding anything. Shouting slogans is not something positive, neither from the government side, nor from the opposition side. We have to reason what is happening.”
“When the events of Mariel occurred… when it was said that we could come to look for family, my uncle came on a boat and waited for about a month in the port of Mariel. In the end, he was able to take only my grandparents and an aunt. My sisters and cousins had to leave later on other boats, because my uncle's boat was filled with criminals and other people to get them out of Cuba. That was a very hard time in my life, because it was the division of the family that was very close. My paternal family was super present. And it is also like a loss of innocence. I was 12 years old, but for me it was brutal that we were asked in schools or in the neighborhoods to go and shout at people who were friends and were like family... classmates who from time to time had come from the same preschool classroom, going through all of primary and secondary school... It was really traumatic, although I never participated in the events. Just having lived through this stage, having to have seen in the political discourse how people were urged to divide, to confront each other... really difficult. Also, the fear for my family that took a week to leave Pedro Betancourt, where they lived. My father… we practically stopped seeing him that whole week. We lived in Jovellanos. He went to Pedro Betancourt, which was a very close municipality, to watch the door of my grandparents and my aunts so that no one would shout or throw eggs or stones. It was like living in a period of contingency. Also, with the pain of knowing that this part of the family that one loved so much… it was a difficult period. // I saw everything during this period. I saw, for example, that they carried out acts of repudiation against decent, good people. I saw the leader of the Pioneers who was a high school teacher, who organized the acts of repudiation… wherever we children went, he would make some interventions in the morning meetings, he would even hand out the little pieces of paper with the slogans that we had to shout. And one day that man disappeared. Later we found out that his family had also come, and he was in Mariel. It was like learning about double standards, about very negative things that did leave a mark on me. I saw a girl who was a year younger than me. Her father, her mother and her brothers left because her family came to look for them. She refused to go because she had a boyfriend who she adored and she did not want to leave her boyfriend. That was not the problem. The problem was that this girl, when they found out that she did not want to go with her family, they took her and took her to all the events to talk, to say: ‘I am not leaving. My family is.’ It was a way of using a child for something that was against their very family nature.”
“We were an agricultural workforce! Let’s be clear here. We were an agricultural workforce. That nice image of complementing study and work according to Martí’s principles… wasn’t exactly like that. We did have to work hard, in very difficult conditions and not in safe conditions. I remember that, for example, one of the many times there was a potato harvest, we went in wagons that were too full of students. They left us without a pass on the weekends, because we had to go and pick the potatoes so they wouldn’t spoil in the fields. And it’s not like now when just a few potatoes are planted… a lot of potatoes were planted. We went without safety conditions on that transport. Many were seated, those who could, and the rest were standing. On one of these occasions, one of the carts stopped abruptly and one of our friends fell. The cart passed over him and killed him. I mean, I will never forget that. His name is Gilberto. I was in eleventh grade, and he was in twelfth. He was one of the water carriers, he brought us water to the fields. He really died in our sight. It is an image that I will never forget. At that moment, perhaps one did not have the full depth… I mean, we did have the pain of having seen this, but we could not make social and political criticism. We were very young.”
Alina Bárbara López Hernández was born on July 30, 1965 in the municipality of Jovellanos, located in the interior of the province of Matanzas, into a humble family. Her father worked as a milling machine operator and her mother was a housewife. Her childhood in this city with a long sugar tradition and a significant number of inhabitants of African descent was peaceful. The family was characterized by a series of customs that always kept them close together, providing a welcoming and decent environment, which led to a clash when Alina had to move to the student residence during her pre-university studies. Alina remembers this stage as a period in which the population had to face several limitations regarding political freedoms, but at the same time highlights some advantages regarding education and health. When the exodus through the port of Mariel occurred, a large part of her family left Cuba. Because of this, she was never able to join the Young Communist League and adopted a negative attitude to the acts of repudiation that were taking place at that time. Her passion for history resulted in her graduation from the Higher Institute of Pedagogy in Matanzas, where she taught for several years before becoming a professor at the University of Matanzas. Her questions about the revolutionary process and its consequences began in the period of Perestroika, when she came into contact with the ideas of intellectuals who began to criticize some aspects of the regime promoted by the Soviet Union. Observing Cuban reality, she began to contribute to magazines that published her critical analyses and after the popular outbreak that took place on July 11, 2021, she was already publicly opposing the regime’s aggression. Her public and critical demonstrations resulted in a series of clashes with the authorities during which she even suffered injuries. She is convinced that change in Cuba must begin within the island.
