The truth is that I don’t know which story from my life I should tell about psychological repression. Ever since I began taking an interest in our rights and how to assert them, they started calling me a counterrevolutionary and making life impossible for me. They start to make it like a war for you from within your own family, they use the people around you (neighbors, friends, acquaintances), which leads you to distrust everyone until you become paranoid; you can never know if the people at your side really support you or are being used to incriminate you for something at any time.
I could talk about the ways in which my children have been discriminated against in school because “their parents were counterrevolutionary,” or how my daughter was rejected by a gymnastics school, despite having the skills to do so, because “she could not represent the school as a pioneer.”
I could also tell you that I can barely move around in my own province because many times they follow every step I take. If I travel to another province, they take me off of the bus or, in instances where I reached my destination, they detain me and return me to my province, as was the case in September 2016, when I traveled to Pinar del Rio to meet with colleagues from the group Convivencia, which in the end I was unable to attend.
In conclusion, since 2003, when I started working as an activist within the independent libraries and with my community project Nueva Esperanza, I have lived under constant stress. I suffer from severe chest pains, digestive system disorders, tachycardia, dizziness and headaches, which force me to take various medications, although I try to take them only in moments of crisis.
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