An Interview with Alberto Valencia                                                                 

November 21, 1940, Alberto Valencia was born in Havana Cuba. At the young age of 21, he and his family left Cuba for a better life. A life shining with freedom, and not dark with repression. Now 65, he is happily married with two children and four grandchildren. He is leading a life many aim for but miss. Here in Glendale is where he begins to tell his story about the life he left behind.

I was born in Havana Cuba, on November 21, 1940, in a part called Vivura. When I grew up I moved to an area called La Otun. I was raised there and lived there till I left Cuba in 1962 and came to the United States. The leader of my country when I was young was… um…….the one I recall was Carlos Prio Socarras. He was the president before Batista. Then Batista took over and he did what they call a force. He forced the government, the previous government, to leave. He used his power to do that and he became the dictator in Cuba until 1959 when Castro came and took over. Socarras was democratic; we had a democratic country with all the Presidents before.  The one before Prio Socarras and all the ones before him were democratic, until Castro took over.  We thought he would be a democrat, then he went onto the other side and one day he said he was a Communist Socialist.  And that’s what happened and is still in our country it’s a Communist country now. When I was little, my fun was to play baseball and ride a lot of bicycles. When I grew up I decided to finish school. I went to a trade school to be a regular contractor for construction and that was almost a year before Castro took over.  I wanted to go to a University to be an architect; it was a dream that never came true because Castro took over.  We didn’t like the system, we didn’t like communism, so we decided to leave the country.  And that was it, I didn’t finish my dream. When Castro took over, the economy was fine. We had everything which right now is nothing in Cuba.  The people can say they have everything, but not like we had before.  We had everything, everything in the United States we had too.  The money was on the same level, we run the dollar in Cuba like a Cuban peso.  We had freedom to our own business; most of the people had their own business.  They ran the business they way they liked it.  Not like now, nobody has their own business, everything is run by the government.  No freedom of speech, we use to have the speech and talk about anything we liked.  Like in the news, everything was personal and now everything is run by the government.  So it’s a big difference in Cuba before 1959, anything after 1959 is a disaster.  That’s why a lot of people are leaving the country.  I left in 1962 and after that everybody wanted to leave, and I know it’s hard to leave.  The leave by boats, plane, and it’s a terrible situation over there.  I’m glad I’ve been here in the United States since 1962, I don’t know how I would live if I were in Cuba now with the communist.  In my home city, everything is destroyed.  You go there and you see the buildings come apart.  They’ve fallen apart and they don’t have the materials to repair.  The people live very poor, they just have everything from before 1959.  Like the old refrigerators, they can’t afford to buy a new one.  Radio systems are the same as the old one.  They can’t buy anything because the government doesn’t have it, and if they do, it’s too expensive and they don’t have money to buy.  They have to buy with the dollar and not the Cuban money.  They don’t have the money unless they have family in the United States that can send money to them, and then they can buy.  Everything is different, a lot different.  One thing is to say it another is to see it for yourself, how the people live in that country.  Right now it’s really bad, they don’t have food to eat every day.  They have to go and look all around to find it.  It’s terrible, terrible.  I don’t know how I can describe it so people can understand the situation there.  I understand that people fly to Cuba as a tourist, and they go to the big hotels, find everything they want and all kinds of foods.  But the people that come as tourist don’t know how the Cuban people live.  They should go out to the streets and ask people “what did you have for breakfast, what did you have for lunch?”  And then they will find out how the people live.  Because in the hotels there is everything. You have all kinds of foods and everything comfortable, but the people that live in the country don’t feel that way.  They aren’t treated the same way. The transformation then and now has been year by year. The year goes by and the more years go by we see situation get really bad.  I understand lately people have gone to Cuba and said it’s getting worse and worse by day.  People complaining there is no food on the table, complaining they can’t get it because they don’t have any money period.  Castro changed the system to where you have to use the dollar.  And they don’t have the dollar, they have whatever family they have in the United States sending money.  So I would say, since he took over in 1959 to now, 2005, it’s worse.  He destroyed my country.  Forty-seven years of revolution will be in January 2006.  And forty-seven years of nothing.  Everything is bad, bad, bad, living there.  It’s been destroyed, and like I said they don’t have the material to rebuild nothing.  Everything is coming apart.  Cars, your driving a car that’s about forty years old.  They don’t have brand new cars like we do in the United States.  Everything is old.  They have to invent the parts to cars because there is no way to find the parts to them. When Castro was in the mountains of Santiago de Cuba with the revolution to destroy the government and Batista, the way he talked and promised that he was going to be a democratic government, even the United States government at the time thought he was going to be a democrat.  When people started saying that everything was covering the American properties, we new he was going to not be democratic.  When we saw that, my father, I was only 21, he decided to leave the country and he said the whole family is leaving period.  We all decided to leave because we knew what was coming.  That sooner or later it was going to be communist.  Which we find out after we came to the United States.  We found out a year later that he’d stood up and said he was a Communist Socialist.  So everything changed after that.  When we wanted to get out of Cuba and go to the United States, we came here with a visa that was obtained by a friend that was already here. The visa was only 25 dollars per person so everyone had a visa for 25 dollars. I think it was six people in the family that left at the same time. Then we had the papers ready in Cuba to leave the country.  My father was the head of the family at the time so he had some properties and cars. Everything was taken by the government, at the house, they put a ‘C’ on the door. They took the cars, everything we had. When we came here we had three pairs of clothes- three pairs of underwear, three pairs of pants, and three pairs of shirts. That’s it, nothing else; no money in our pockets. So everything was left there and taken by the government. So we decided to leave anyway. Even when we knew we were leaving everything, we were looking for the freedom we knew was not in Cuba. The day we left it was about 8 o’clock and we went to the Jose Martin international airport. There were people that checked our papers and luggage at the airport and then we were off. When we got to Miami, we were checked once again for our papers and luggage and we were taken to a hotel that we then spent the evening at. We were given $100 and sent to a refugee center where we were directed to a place where we could get some food and clothes. After filling out some papers we got our social securities that same day. We stayed in Miami for 2 months and then moved out here to California where we’ve lived all these years.

We felt that democracy was the best party for us. We had it in Cuba before, and knew it was the better party then the communist. We decided to continue with the democrat party because we knew the communist was not the same. You see the communist is only for themselves. There is no was to progress, no way to be independent. You have to be whatever the government says. And that’s what’s happening right now in Cuba. Everybody works for the government, and most are for the government. You belong to the government. Everything you do is because the government told you to.  There is no freedom, that’s why we didn’t like it. You’re living in a country where there is no room for you to move, to do whatever you want to do. It’s a bad country to live in.

The problem with Castro is that he divided families. There are families that like the system and families that don’t like the system. And that’s happening now in Cuba, it’s divided. In the United States there are families with relatives in Cuba, and those members are thinking it’s the best government. But in our family, most of us are in the United States. They are here because they don’t like the country. They don’t like the government’s situation. Then there are families that live here and don’t like it. There are also some people that live in Cuba and still like it. Maybe it’s because they can’t get out and feel they have to support and approve of what they’re doing over there. Castro killed a lot of people and divided a lot of families that said “I like it” or “No, I don’t like it, I’m leaving.”  The people in Cuba cannot talk. They cannot say nothing about the government. They have no freedom to do that. Not like in the United States where you can stand up and say what’s on your mind. If you say something in Cuba, they can arrest you, they can put you in jail, or they can kill you, or you could die in jail for anything you do against the government. If you say “I don’t like this government, I don’t like what they’re doing. This is a communist country,” for anything you say you are risking your life. There are some families that still belong to the government and are still like policemen or like the army or something.  And if you are family and say something they can talk and say “Hey my family is against the government.”  And you can be arrested.  You have to be careful with who you talk to and what your say.  Even a family member and turnaround and say something to the government about something you said. And one day you could be arrested. It’s a bad system and government.  I hate seeing how the Cubans are living now.  They have no way to say I want to buy this today, like you go into the store here.  Here you can buy what you want.  In Cuba there is no merchandise.

After forty-four, forty-seven years of revolution, I don’t know what people will do if and when Castro dies.  If Castro died tomorrow I think everything will change.  The leader in Cuba is just Castro, nobody else.  He is the only one that puts in the orders.  When people see that he is gone that is going to change.  When people see the freedom that they can have anything they want, and the country starts having everything, the people will have freedom to buy anything.  They will see a big difference, were they can control their own lives.  This will be so much better than when it was communist. Everything comes from the bottom of my heart.  I have family there that is suffering right now and I know what the country is going through.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Interview by: Adriana Valencia