Lic. René Gómez Manzano

“The attraction [of communism] for me is basically intellectual. You read the books about Marxism-Leninism, and so on, and it is an attractive thing, a beautiful thing. There are no exploiters, everything is in common, man is man's brother... And then it turns out that this is just the theory. But when you come to practice, to a regime like those of Stalin in Russia or like the Kim dynasty in North Korea, or the Castro brothers in Cuba, the practice has absolutely nothing to do with theory, I mean. There is no real collective property. It is simply a state’s capitalism, while the state is the power which controls the means. A bureaucracy with a pyramidal structure, where the chief is simply the one who designates and determines what is to be done, and below him, there is an intermediary rank of the leaders, of the chiefs... And below, the great mass of the people, as said a colleague and friend of mine, whose basic function is to applaud. The only one who has no problems is the one who applauds. He applauds until his hands swell.”

“In our case, we were immediately recognized as conscience prisoners [political prisoners] by the international organizations. I must say that it is an interesting thing - nowadays, the regime tries to avoid by any kind of means the trials. This has recently changed. The regime avoids the trials, that is to say, [not] as it happened to me in the usual [former] practice, in my second prison I was imprisoned for more than a year and a half, without a formal accusation, and of course without any trial. And one day they just let me go. Now, either they do that, or they try to pass to trials just the human rights activists and other political opponents. Trials for common crimes. They create a cause - for example, the police come, they give a tremendous beating to a citizen, and then they accuse this citizen of an attack. That is, of having attacked a policeman. That kind of things. They always try to ensure that the sanctions are for common crimes, that is the situation that currently exists with political prisoners. Many of them, I repeat, are masked by alleged common crimes that do not really exist."

"In my specific case, in 1996 or 1997, I became involved with other people of dissent, in concrete, we formed a group called the 'Internal Dissident Working Group [to analyze the Cuban Socio-Economic Situation], created by four people, who were later called the 'Group of Four'. We are talking about the Professor Felix Antonio Bonne Carcassés who unfortunately died in January of this year [2017], Vladimiro Roca Antúnez, son of the old communist leader Blas Roca, of the Popular Socialist Party - PSP, and Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello. These three people and I formed the Internal Dissident Working Group, and then in 1997, we issued a document called ‘The Homeland is of Everyone’ ['La Patria es de Todos']."