Georgina Galardy González

"You go to an airline and buy a ticket. That ticket automatically migrates to a database and activates a procedure with a circular note with an advisory. When the circular note with the advisory reaches the relevant official, he starts working on it. That means that between the time you buy your ticket and your flight, the circular note with the advisory can change into a ban. So, you have your ticket and later you arrive at the airport and in between they have forbidden you to fly. The same thing can happen when you want to fly to Cuba."

"We had the newest model of TV and all the fashionable excesses of the time. That is the type of milieu we lived in. I can tell you an experience I had either in 1971 or 1972...// I was at the fifteenth birthday party of an acquaintance. The celebration was in the center of Havana in what was a gymnasium at the time. What music do you think was playing there at a time when it was forbidden to listen to music with English-language texts? At a time when artists and young people were being tyrranized, when listening to the Beatles and all that was prohibited... At that party, I felt like I was at a fashion show by Chanel. The luxury... I was wearing a little cotton dress that grandmother had sewn for me, she was still alive then. The shoes that mother had gotten for me were too big. I was dressed nicely, clean... Nevertheless, in the middle of all that ostentation, I felt like a newcomer. It shocked me. I must have been about eleven or twelve years old at the time. That ostentation and luxury had nothing in common with what they were driving into my head at home. I saw that hypocrisy with my own eyes and it really affected me."

"In Cuba, they process all possible information. Nobody is so unimportant that it would not be in the interest of the state to observe him. Not even the poorest of the poor. What people say in food stores, what they talk about in public buses. All of that is analyzed. All of that is graded, studied and consequently it is decided how to proceed in the given case. Just imagine it... the course of action is based on such petty things as what people are talking about in a supermarket."

"My father studied Political Science and was a very devout Marxist from an ideological point of view. Ultimately, he even undertook post-graduate studies and really had Marxism deep under his skin. I would say to an unhealthy degree. His ideals and principles were pathologically strict; he never understood anything that contradicted them. Only once did I experience him not being in agreement with something. It was on 26 July 1992, when they allowed the use of the dollar. He did not agree with it, however he also did nothing to oppose it, because it was Fidel's decision. And it is important to remember what situation Cuba was in. That was why the use of the dollar was allowed. In his opinion however, that was counter-revolutionary and anexionistic. He literally said that. I will never forget that. A revolutionary is really supposed to live on whatever is available at the time. Imagine that the context is even more serious today. And he thought that it was necessary to live on whatever there was. He continued thinking this way until his death. At home, we were forbidden from speaking English; we could not play English-language songs. He said that he did not want to hear a single word from those people in their language. Nothing that was related to the capitalist world ... Did you want chewing gum? Well, be very careful with that. He was a Marxist Nazi."