“You’re a cynic with no soul, God must punish you”

Díaz Canel with the dictator Raúl Castro

When Miguel Díaz Canel,( Cuba’s future “President” and now State Council’s -Consejo de Estado- Vice President), was the Communist Party’s First Secretary in the Holguín province and I was a doorman at the El Jazz Club Cabaret, in the city’s downtown, he walked in one evening, after 8 p.m., with three Central Committee members.

A little later, an elderly lady arrived with three children at the Club’s entrance. She came to me and told me she needed to speak with Díaz Canel, because he had promised he would help her, but never did. I let her in because I do not like injustice and I wanted to see what the First Secretary would say.

From the entrance I heard as the lady, with a faltering but loud voice, told him: “You’re a cynic with no soul, God must punish you. You promised you’d repair my house, which burned down, but you never did.” The lady was immediately thrown out, put in a car and taken away with her three children. I never saw her again .

The following day, when I arrived at work, they called me to explain why I had let the lady in. I told them I had because I though it unfair they had promised to help her but did not do so. At that moment they accused me of being a counterrevolutionary and told me that if those were my political thoughts I could not continue working there. I replied that my thoughts were not those of a counterrevolutionary but of a fighter for human rights, and four days later I left the place.

Díaz Canel with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un

During his time in Holguín, Díaz Canel left the province more impoverished. What he did was to promise without delivering, damage the province’s economy and fill his pockets with money. All that is left of his project “Imagen de Ciudad” (“City Image”) are the boulevards and the parks he promised he would repair. They have not been finished ten years after he left. The houses that were falling apart in the vicinity remained like that. His “Plan Rastrillo” (“Rake Plan”) left hundreds of local people without a job. It consisted of taking away any merchandise street vendors better known as carretilleros (pushcart vendors), arrest them and impose high fines that were impossible to pay. We, Cubans, have to carefully think that Cuba becomes what we want.

Our children’s future is our responsibility, so is the will not to live under a dictatorship as the one we have suffered for more than 50 years.

I, Pedro Pablo Celestrín Reina, take full responsibility for this text, and I call all Cubans to defend their rights. A new, free Cuba is possible. I am the Defensoría del Pueblo’s (People’s Defense) Coordinator in the Province of Holguín.