Francis Sánchez

“We tried to free ourselves from all those ideological and aesthetic coordinates that they wanted to impose on us. We tried to read differently. One of the adventures that united us in those years was trying to obtain bibliographies, books to which we did not have access. Living in Ciego de Ávila, living in Cuba, where almost nothing interesting was published about what was happening in the world of literature, not at that time, not even a decade ago, but already knowing that those authors such as Jorge Luis Borges did not appear in our library in Ciego de Ávila, even the book Paradiso by Lezama Lima, El llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo, was prohibited. To read it, in short, it could not be found in libraries. I remember that the justification for why El llano en llamas was not in the libraries was because it was a superstitious book.”

“For me being a writer is my way of being a coward, which means, I couldn't do many things, so I was going to be a writer. But then, in the middle of this crisis, I locked myself in my house and refused to leave it. I was locked up at home, I stopped studying and I was locked up for like two or three years, when I practically never left the house. That meant something terrible to my family. I went through psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals, I went through very strong experiences. I saw that my friends in the neighborhood also had difficult destinies. The sword of Damocles has always pointed on us, for this minority, there was a jail for minors, which existed in Ciego de Ávila and in all the provinces.”

“One of the first things that the Revolution intervened, the government of Fidel Castro, were the cinemas. They immediately saw an important ideological apparatus in cinemas across Cuba, as had also happened in the Soviet Union, cinemas intervened, it was one of the first things they did. There are memories of my family from that day, very clear. It was a very tragic event, because suddenly the military staff arrived. It is said that Alfredo Guevara himself came, who later became the director of the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industries, ICAIC. It seems that they were running a campaign and sent my whole family out, because my family, especially my mother, my brothers who were little, my grandfather, all worked in the cinema in one way or another, supporting, selling tickets, or working as ushers. They sent everyone out and only the music discs that were played in the cinema could be recovered.”