I was born in a small village in the south of Cuba, surrounded by the poverty that my family endured, but filled with the type of love and affection that I have never known again in my life. This was the Cuban version of the Macondo described by Gabriel García Márquez in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—a time when poverty and migration had not yet deteriorated and fractured the Cuban family. It took me a long time to manage to wake up from the deception that has led me and many of my generation to have defended the Marxist ideology and its utopian vision of the world. This awakening has been full of clashes. The distant memories I have of my childhood are associated with sugar—azúcar—a magical word that Celia Cruz, the Cuban singer exiled in the U.S., always used to sing about, because the small village where I grew up was part of a region that depended economically on the sugar industry. Back then, no one in Cuba would have suspected that Fidel Castro would shut down the sugar mills in 2004. In addition to the structural weaknesses of the Cuban government, such as excessive bureaucracy, corruption, the centralized economy, and the drastic restriction of private initiative, the combined problems caused by drought, the collapse of its major sugar partner, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. blockade worsened the country's economy. But this is how it felt to me: the Cuban Revolution wrecked everything, it was disrespectful to tradition and our identity. Cuban sugar as well as coffee, rum and tobacco are symbols rooted in the social consciousness. Many of the thousands unemployed from the sugar industry had to either fall back to the hard work in the fields, to self-employment, or to sink into the darkness and the uncertainty of depending on the black market, considered in Cuba as one of the main escape valves. When I return to my hometown from time to time to visit my relatives, it pains me to see the decline and misery that plagues the everyday life of many villages formerly living off the sugar industry in Cuba, and I am moved by the longing that many people feel for a world that has collapsed before their very eyes. This world, frustrating and decadent, has been masterfully depicted in the Cuban film Melaza by independent filmmaker Carlos Lechuga. Human beings in Cuba are subjected to indoctrination during childhood in elementary schools. The daily ritual consisted of absurd and repetitive morning lessons filled with slogans that made no sense to me. It was a mechanical process where each child repeated the words “pioneers for communism, we will be like the Che.” When I was a boy I saw reality as something natural, as if this totalitarian world that repressed human dignity was something natural and accepted by everyone. You were not allowed to have ties with foreigners either, but at that time the only tourists I had ever met were Soviets and others coming from communist countries, who saw the Cuban reality as something very natural. Fortunately, as I grew up and gained access to information, I found out that the communist paradise that was described to me as if it were the gospel, the so-called reign of the “New Man” was, in fact, the complete negation of what I had been taught, the farthest thing from the reign of social justice that it was proclaimed to be. Rather, it was nothing short of hell, not only because of the scarcity and shortages that have always plagued the daily lives of the Cuban people but also because of the lack of liberty, a tragedy that has worsened with the passing of time. Nowadays, expressing your ideas in the Cuban public space is a risky act, and exercising independent journalism can lead you to jail. Notwithstanding, I enjoyed that period of my existence, bathing in the rivers and drinking the exquisite guarapo, sugar cane juice, that I used to drink when I traveled on a rickety bicycle to the nearest sugar mill. Photo from Seb/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Among the saddest memories I have of those early years of my life is one of me walking past a church as if it were a forbidden place. The ideology of state atheism reigned in Cuba in the eighties, and you could not practice any religion, whether evangelical or Yoruba. In high school, I joined the Union of Young Communists (Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas, UJC, in Spanish) with the same inertia that many adolescents and young people in my country did, and then I went to split my pre-university studies with agricultural work under adverse conditions in the countryside.