Celia Iris González Álvarez

“I think that for me a change was Luis Manuel Otero's Biennial 00. Henry and I participated in the Biennial 00 with an intervention. We put some commemorative flowers for a Minister of Labor from the 1930s... there is a bust that had been erected with resources from the community... thinking of a previous Cuba in which these things happened, in which people did a spontaneous commemoration of the Minister of Labor, thinking of civic practices, because that was the name of the project. What happened from then on was that Henry, who used to be a professor at ISA, was no longer the professor at ISA. They began to summon him to State Security to talk with him. We already had Isabelita - that was the person who attended us. My brother, who is a repressor who spent the 1990s interrogating political prisoners in Villa Marista -that was his job at the Ministry of the Interior-, sat my mother and father in a park to threaten that they would arrest me, because I was in Operation 00. Then my mom started having a nervous tic that wouldn't go away, and chaos began in my family. And that is the way they have to suppress you. There are strategies depending on who you are. My family, on my father's side, everyone was from the Ministry of the Interior, so they did not need to put a patrol outside, because they simply have the tools inside and they are also more effective at the family level, at the affective level. They move emotionally more than if such people come.”

“I became a young communist at the age of fourteen and at fifteen I entered the School of Art and at the School of Art they immediately made me general secretary of the entire school... at fifteen... imagine. I didn't really know what I was doing and all the implications of that. But I took being a communist and a revolutionary very seriously. I held meetings at eight at night because it was the time that everyone could and I had to have all the activists from the school, students, teachers. Those who were militants had to be present. Me, being fifteen years old, was holding meetings of thirty people gathered at that time. I summoned them and we made minutes, we taught everything and I don't know what else. I grew, I handed in a card from the Union of Young Communists, that was for a year in San Alejandro, I took the task very seriously. And that was not good, because a granddaughter of Raúl Castro and a daughter of Commander Almeida were studying in San Alejandro. And they were from the Union of Young Communists but they did not go to the meetings. So I grabbed the manual and said: 'Ah, what I have to do is sanction them, because they don't come to the meetings.' And then, the mother came, Almeida’s wife, that girl’s mother, that girl, who was actually very mediocre, as she didn't know how to paint, but she was there because San Alejandro was an elite school, they talked to the director who was an opportunistic woman who was there to... Later her husband was Minister of Culture and they removed him right away because he was a corrupt person, those people who travel to Europe to buy clothes with state money. Well, this lady came, she spoke with the director and the director said that I could not sanction this girl. I went home very confused, I did not understand anything and at that moment I stopped going to the Union of Young Communists.”

“(In my school) were many children from Miramar, which was one of the most expensive areas where the military also lived, it was the elite area. So, my little friends were children of people who worked in corporations and had money. They went to school with Barbie backpacks, with shoes and I don't know what else. I used to go to class with a plastic bag and my father painted my shoes with a paint to paint the bars, because everything was very precarious despite living in a good neighborhood. My dad and my mom lived in that neighborhood because my dad divorced his first wife and for the second time in his life, they gave him a box with keys so he could choose where to live. This time, not in houses like during his first marriage, but in luxury apartments in Miramar. In the same floor where we lived there was a mistress of a commander or a general of the Revolution. I felt that we lived in a building of mistresses. He came to pick up this lady in a car with antennas and everything, this woman's lover. So, this was the situation. It was a situation that now that I analyze it as an adult, as of course back then I didn't have that level of analysis, ends up in knowing I grew up in contradiction. I no longer grew up like my siblings who were born in the 60s and who were born with a colonel father who saw him dressed in green with a car with a driver, a person who has traveled the world. I grew up with a father in contradiction that he had to do illegal work, but he always remained an ally of the Party.”