“Of course they are mad, they have deceived you, they have manipulated you, they have limited all your freedom, they have your people detained, they are doing exactly the same thing to them as to you, on top of that, they do not let you complain. If you leave and complain you are an enemy, a worm, a stateless person, you are the worst. On top of that, they won't let you come back. They blackmail you and take money from you so that yours are not as bad as you were.”
“Spain has been to me an opportunity to mature. I had matured a lot in Cuba because I was never a protected or privileged girl, which would mean for example not having to work. But Spain has had a much greater impact because we are talking about doing all that without a community that protects you, doing all that in a culture that is not yours, having to make new friends and new relationships to survive, starting to do new things being already more than 30 years old. To renew yourself, reinvent yourself several times, the immigrant is renewing himself all the time.”
“For too many years, people lived without thinking about a country. Which means, the country is established, I do what comes to me, I raffle. Today those at the top think one thing, and tomorrow I see how I handle with what they have thought. But I do not think of the country. I don't think about how it can be better, I don't think about how to contribute to make it a better place. I get used to it and flow within what others decide. Those who thought of the country during all those years were those who were outside.”
“There are a series of ideological and political conditions that create you not as a person with the ability to decide on your own life, but as a person with the ability to obey the people who decide on your life. And when you don't obey, well, there is a punishment, and, of course, nobody wants to receive the punishment. And here comes the other part, which is self-censorship. The one that you know that there is a punishment, you know that there is an ideological pack, and, even if you do not trust or believe in the ideological pack, you comply with it, because you do not want to receive the punishment, because you already know, opportunistically, from a double tremendous morality, that if you say what they want to hear, then you're going to receive a prize, and if you don't say what they want to hear, then you're going to get a punishment. And so you start to function since you are a child with the first poem in the morning, the first march you have to go to, the first thing you have to shout, the first little flag you have to raise to earn the right to be the most integral and have a career, that they don't lower you in the ranks, be among the best... that they don't reject you, that they don't publicly bully you, starting from the teachers themselves, and you start doing all that, and the time comes when you’re 15 years and you work in the same way.”
“I came home from school, and my grandparents sent me to play. Everyone in the neighborhood agreed and they sent us to play with the other little friends. And then they called us all to eat at the same time. ‘Hey, come on, playing is over, let's eat.’ I remember that, from that time on, I stopped eating with my grandparents at the same table. I ate after playing. And my grandparents had already eaten. And there was a day when I went in, I can’t forget, and I see my grandfather eating a sweet potato, alone, with nothing else, and then they served me an egg with two or three things, meaning, the egg that was there was for me. And I asked, obviously, why grandpa had eaten something different and what grandpa told me was that he loved sweet potatoes because they were good for the hair and I don't know what, another story. It was realizing and beginning to suspect and inquire that he ate before me so that I would not see the difference in what we ate.”
According to them, being a revolutionary has nothing to do with revolutionizing, changing, questioning, criticizing the status quo in which you live. No, it has to do with following orders.
Massiel Rubio Hernández was born in Havana, Cuba, on September 14, 1985. At the age of two, she was taken to Jaruco, a town in the former province of Havana, now Mayabeque, where she was raised by her paternal grandparents, with few resources and a pension that would be the equivalent of ten euros in Spain. She lived her childhood during the years of the Special Period. She studied at the School of Art Instructors as part of the Battle of Ideas from the age of 14 to 18, upon graduation she began her social service and joined to study his degree at the University of Havana, in the Faculty of Arts, from where she graduated 6 years later in the Socioculture career, and immediately passed to enter the Higher Institute of Art to study the specialty of Dramaturgy, from which she graduated five years later. She worked during all these years of study as an actress and teacher. Later, in the face of the crisis and rising prices, she also sold merchandise on the black market and was an assistant for audiovisual materials. She began to work shortly before leaving Cuba as an editorial manager and proofreader for a Spanish publishing house, a job she maintains until today. She emigrated to Spain when she was thirty-two years old, and since then she does activism against the island’s government both in person and through her social networks. In 2021, she created a Humanitarian Corridor to send medicines and medical supplies to sick Cuban citizens.
