“(After working for more than thirty years in the nickel mining plant), I have nothing at all. The only benefit that sometimes affects me is that on selected days, when the factory commemorates something and celebrates something, I get a little something to eat. Maybe a little meat, some beans, some rice. It's a farce to make it seem like they remember you. But in reality, it's not. That's clear when you consider that my pension is the equivalent of about ten to twelve dollars, if we were to convert it to real value. That's my pension. They pay me 1,587 Cuban pesos, which can't even be compared to anything that has any value. It's like a bunch of bananas for baking. You can't buy meat, beans, or anything like that with that. We live in total poverty here."
“The working conditions are miserable. They try to convince you that they are protecting you. You get protective pants and a shirt. That's all, and it's definitely not like they are taking care of you out of Christian love. When they fire you, you find yourself completely alone. Every pensioner is a beggar. They don't care about you anymore. They had a plan for you, they got what they needed from you, and when you're old, they kick your ass.”
“When you are trying to get a job, not only your education is assessed, but also your political orientation and social tendencies. If you raise doubts in any of these categories, you will not get a job. So, you can get something, let's say, less attractive. All this takes place under the supervision and on the orders of the Communist Party of Cuba, the unions and in general the managers who themselves have passed through a very fine sieve. They also had to be members of the Communist Party to become leaders. It is all one big apparatus that contains a whole system of conditions that must be met. It gradually educates you, and if you listen and follow the instructions, it gives you the opportunity to move somewhere. Of course, I had to accept all this. I did not do it out of some deep inner conviction, but I had no choice. I had a wife and four children. I could have been promoted in the factory, but I would not have had a chance elsewhere. I did not know anything else and I did not have any contacts. So I became a slave in their service. During my career, I had to educate myself ideologically to appear ideologically credible. Without it, you won't get anywhere. You'll find a job, but you can forget about any promotion. You can't do it without it, and it doesn't matter that you have technical knowledge, because I had it too. But over time, all this began to reveal itself to me in its true form. There comes a moment when it completely gets out of your hands and everything happens automatically. In the meantime, I also had to learn about scientific Marxism, I took a course, I became a member of the Communist Party of Cuba. I went through all of that. In short, once you get caught in a spider's web, it's very difficult to get out of it. If you succeed, it ends with you being fired. And that's exactly what happened to me.”
Rolando Manuel Rodríguez Azahares comes from a family with a very mixed relationship with the revolutionary process in Cuba. He himself achieved considerable success as an employee of the nickel mining plant in Moa, one of the main pillars of the island country’s economy. He started as a helper and, over the course of almost four decades, worked his way up to the position of head of the automation department at the factory. In the meantime, he became a member of the Communist Party of Cuba and was also involved in the Commission for the Defense of the Revolution. However, after all these years, he came to the conclusion that the Cuban government does not care about people working for the welfare of the country and today he is definitely not one of its supporters. After all, he survives only thanks to the money sent to him from abroad by his relatives. One of his brothers, Ramón Rodríguez Azahares, contributed his story to the database of the Memory of the Nation project, in which he tells how, after decades of work in the Cuban construction sector, he finally became an opponent to the Cuban regime, among other things because of the repression of which his son, one of the most respected Cuban dissidents, Néstor Rodríguez Lobaina, was a victim.
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!
