What have you changed your mind about over the years?
The first thing that comes to mind is my love of history; it was something I hated in school, but later on loved.
A major change in my attitude was political. My parents and Godmother Elena were active in the Partido Ortodoxo, the one to which Fidel Castro also belonged before the assault to the Moncada Barracks on 26 July 1953, before which, since August 1951, when Eduardo Chibás died, he visited the cemetery each sixteenth of the month, after which he visited our house to drink Cuban coffee and bum a cigar from my father, therefore, my family was hopeful when the revolution came about, until it won.
I was never active in politics, knew and liked people on both sides. Many students were actively opposing the Batista Government at the University of Havana, under the leadership of the president of the FEU (Federación Estudiantil Universitaria) José Antonio Echevarría, who was killed on 13 March 1957, during the failed attack on the Presidential Palace.
The police was agressive, especially against young males at night, because there were some planting pipe bombs in public places, throwing Molotov cocktails into display windows. Once I was walking on the sidewalk of Calle 23, passing in front of the Woolworth Ten-cent store, when a car came by, through a Molotov cocktail into the display window right in front of me and kept going. So did I, kept on walking to Calle 12, where there was a stand-up three-cent coffee stand, and drank coffee.
Police stopped my friends and I several times, but we could always talk our way out of it, you see, there were also cautious, they could get in trouble if we had connections, therefore clean-cut youths that were not afraid of them when stopped, made them reflect.
On January 1959, when Batista fled and the revolution took over, my family was hopeful that things would get better, but far from it, the public sham of TV trials and the double-jeopardy of the trials of the aviators, the Agrarian Reform, the constant slogans promoting hatred and division, the many firing squads and arbritary prisioners, the confiscation of private property without compensation and many other abuses promptly disappointed my family and changed our perspective, beginning with my father, later the rest of us.
To close this question, I have had to change my mind about the capabilities of the Cuban Exiles to resist effectively against the Cuban Regime and the U.S. CIA manipulation, we were entirely too naive. The Republican Party, which I have been affiliated since becoming a citizen in 1965, for which I worked as poll watcher and precinct captain, has deeply disappointed me, their goals are no longer what I thought they were, that of small government, free enterprise economy,little government intervention; it seems that politicians, once elected, join the club and their primary goal becomes catering to donors, being reelected, forgetting their promises.
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