“It took a year to get the Cuban authorities to issue me permission to leave Cuba. One day after work … Back then, I was an employee of the Ministry of Construction … I came back slightly after 6 p.m., and my mother, God rest her soul, told me: ‘You have received a telegram. Tomorrow you have to go to the office, on Thursday you are leaving ' and, just like that, it happened. - (Your mother was sad, wasn't she?) Yeah. The point was that nine years ago, everything had been completely different since the people thought they were just leaving temporarily. The Caribbean crisis had just struck, and the Cuban exiles had landed in the Bay of Pigs. We'd believed something might happen at any time. Especially, that the government would fall, so we would be able to travel at will. But after those nine years, leaving was not that easy, nothing was that easy. We already knew it was a one-way trip, and only God knew when we shall meet again.”
“Right at the beginning of my time in the Forced Labor Camp (UMAP), I had noticed a boy who came from the Matanzas province as well. He looked like the living dead. One of the wardens in our group claimed that it is just unmitigated gall, lack of manners, and so on. But the poor boy could barely stand up. They came up with a new task for him he had been ordered to carry water for other workers in the field. He clearly wasn't capable of doing that well he was not capable of doing anything whatsoever. One was surprised when he didn't drop to the ground right away. They had to take him to the hospital two weeks after, and later we learned he had died due to acute leukaemia.”
"The Caribbean crisis struck in October 1962. I had already booked a flight on October 24 to finally get out of Cuba. But on the night of October 22, US President J. F. Kennedy made a speech, God rest his soul, he announced that Soviet missiles were being installed in Cuba. The entire air connection was, therefore, in a flash abolished. Almost eight months had passed since then, and in 1963, my relatives, who had managed to emigrate, were able to send me money. By virtue of that, I could start arranging the departure from Cuba once again. This time it was supposed to be through Spain together with my mother and aunt. I didn't have any siblings since I'm an only child. I eventually applied for a flight to Spain, and as months went by, no verdict was being made, so I decided to ask what was going on. They stated: 'If you'll leave the house to the state, you can fly away straight off.' Well, that was an excellent solution. I would have handed over not just my house but also home to three elderly people. Where would they go? Should I have let them sleep in the park? That was when all property was taken over by the socialist government, the time of nationalization.”
Juan Antonio Villar Garrote was born on August 17, 1943, in Cárdenas, a small town, about 150 kilometres away from Havana. He attended there Business High School, and in March 1959, began working in a grocery store. Initially, the victory of the Cuban Revolution was a huge relief to him. He anticipated it could restore order after the boundless competition between various ideologic groups, which had only caused terror and fear for a great amount of time. Unfortunately, the opposite was true. Gradually Juan Antonio began to realize that the slogans and promises made by the revolutionary leaders were not actually being fulfilled. He deduced that Fidel Castro was turning towards communism and therefore decided to emigrate. However, his several attempts to leave the country did not work out for a long time. Although he once got the opportunity to emigrate, he refused it because it required him to exchange his house, where lived three elderly people. Then in 1965, he was unable to travel through the port of Camarioca since he was only 22, and the applicants must have been over 27 years old to get the permit. As a result of being a practising Catholic constantly trying to emigrate, he was summoned in 1966 to the newly established forced labour re-education camps in Spanish called Unidades de Ayuda Militar a la Producción. There he witnessed the unfortunate fate of several people who were unable to withstand the poor working and living conditions. After the camps were closed, he tried to leave Cuba as soon as possible. He received permission to travel to the United States through the Swiss Embassy and he has lived there since the early 1970s.
