Elena Larrinaga de Luis

“So, I said that we were going to monitor, to do our work, but to monitor everything, what really happens. In other words, [the issue of] the prisoners is phenomenal, but in Cuba everyone is imprisoned, but in the end people get used to the issue of the prisoners and they get exhausted, so we were going to try to handle it out from other points of view. And then we started, Alejandro, Bertha [Soler], all the prisoners, among others, and we started to work and it began to pick up its pace. We have many observers within the country. It works well and we have also had a lot of problems. We have achieved many things in Europe, although not everything we would have wanted, but we could bring a Motion to the Council of Europe on workers' rights. We were able to get all the recommendations to the bilateral Agreement, because we did not agree with what Mogherini was proposing. We also presented all the amendments to the Constitutional Reform.”

“In the United States, we didn't have a bad time. That house was a big house where they were welcoming people all the time. And there I began to experience what exile was like. People, relatives or not, relatives or friends, who were there and then left, were welcomed all the time. You could never create any strong ties. These were three very difficult and very instructive years. When my father left [Cuba] and finally he got there, he said, well, now we have to organize us, because this does not seem to have any function. The Bay of Pigs had just happened, it was difficult.”

“We no longer belong to ourselves, we belong to the Homeland. With this phrase, the Revolution claimed the right to dismantle society and families. Not only, let's say, through education, meaning that they closed all private schools, free schools, they monopolized education, but also the system which was imposed in kindergartens, country schools, pre-university schools and high school boarding schools. They took the children away from their families. In addition, they threatened to take away the parental authority of the children from the parents and send the children to Russia, but after that they didn’t send them there. But that was when my family and many others made the decision to take their children out [from Cuba], because they did not want to lose their children's parental authority. They [the Cuban government] did not want Catholic families. You probably already know that Marxism and Christianity are almost religions, because Marxism almost became a religion. Marxism denied God, but you had to worship a human being as if he were God, which is an absurd thing.”