“There were groups that controlled each other, like religious, this whole thing, those groups, typified as possible 'CR', the counterrevolutionaries were called 'CR'. The group did this type of things. It was very common to persecute those who had been members of the Huber Matos group or troops. When Huber Matos was arrested, all the graduates and all these people were being checked, because Huber Matos was said to have betrayed, then those persecuted people were submitted to a follow-up of their conduct. And I can tell you that all the religious people, the Jehovah Witnesses, the Seventh Day Adventists, all these people, the Baptists, all the religious people had a follow-up. This kind of state of opinion was being created. At that time, the 'Radio Martí' was already working, there were those who listened to 'Radio Martí', all the people who listened to 'Radio Martí'. And there is one very important thing, Fidel Castro imposed the philosophy that all criticism of the system was counterrevolutionary. Therefore, whoever spoke badly, whoever criticized the 'Revolution' was already condemned to be considered a possible major disaffected person, and they had to be followed up."
“You couldn't even get out of the system because they didn't allow you to request to leave. If you went out, they punished you with the dangerousness [pre-delictive social dangerousness]. I must note that you had to be there, stock to the weapon. On one occasion an officer from State Security came here and talked to me. He found out that I was a educated person, I was the head of the mathematics department at the Rodrigo García Portales Junior High School. 'You are educated, revolutionary person, a person with integrity...’ and so on. He tried to convince me to join the course that was held in Santiago de Cuba at school, it was called 'Fighting the enemy'. Officially, it belonged to the CDR [Committees for the Defense of the Revolution], but really the ones who gave us classes were top-ranking officers, commanders, lieutenants, captains – all these gave us surveillance classes. Well, it was called 'Fighting the Enemy', and you can get the idea about which type of classes were taught there.”
“There in the Palace of Justice they did the trial, that trial was really fast. The defense attorney did not…the legal representative himself proposed the penalty [sic] - absence 11 days long, which they gave us as a sentence, as a cause, for an unjustified absence from the command post, something like that, for 11 days. My sentence and the one of the other boy was three months in prison, in the 'La Cantera' prison. Saying 'La Cantera de Miranda' was terrible because that place was famous for what was happening there. There was a prison, there was a cell, that was the punishment cell and they put people in. We got there, I slept that night in the pavilion, it was a really really weird place. And then they put us to work.”
“One day they came making a proposal that, at the moment, nobody understood. We were happy to go to Havana to study. In five years we were going to be Agricultural Engineers. We went to Havana. We entered Havana and that was a fraud. Because, we were some third graders, fourth graders and I entered the Jesús Menéndez Institute. After four months they put us to march, we were military. From there we were transferred to Camagüey to chop cane. I saw that that made no sense. So I asked to be discharged, it was problematic, traumatic, because the head of the unit there said that, from this school one could leave just into a prison, dead or expelled for bad work-attitude.”
Miguel Osorio Rodríguez today belongs to the critics of the communist system in the Republic of Cuba, however, it has not always been like this - Miguel collaborated for 12 years with State Security. He was born in 1948 in the city of Baire, into a humble family, which is why when the Cuban Revolution ended in 1958, Miguel, at the age of 10, followed the new communist doctrine, since it seemed to him the right and fair thing for his country. His conviction did not change, not even when at the age of 20 he was imprisoned for three months while trying to escape from his “studies”, when he was sent as a student soldier to the province of Guantánamo. All his life he has worked as a popular teacher, and he prepared himself until graduating with a Bachelor of Mathematics and a Master of Educational Sciences. When he attended the training „Fighting the enemy“ in Santiago de Cuba, he began his collaboration with State Security. Miguel became one of the cooperators of the regime dressed in civilian clothes, whose job was to monitor and persecute those who were not comfortable for the system. The cooperation ended in 1994, when he became ill and during the three years that his illness lasted, he did not receive corresponding medical attention. At that moment he realized that the communist ideology was an absolute fraud. Since then, he has dedicated himself to denouncing the violations of the rights of teachers and the Cuban population by the communist regime.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
