“We do not live well, because there are no resources, this country is very bad. There is no wire to fence, there is no clamp, there is no lace, there is no liquid, there is no file, there is no machete, there is nothing to work with. So the little that one can do is by force there and there with an ax and machete, with pickaxes and we plant a little coffee that is already beginning to produce, a lot of bananas that we already have in production. My husband has about seven or eight little cows that are already producing. But there is not even a wire to make a corral.”
“There was not a drop of fat. Do you know what I used to do for butter? We would go to the mountains and bring corojo [endemic Cuban type of palm tree, whose nuts are used for extracting oils] and put it to dry. And then we would break it up and take out a jar of corojo, two five-pound jars of corojo. We gave it a little heat, they roasted it and ground it in some machine. This ground awfulness was poured into water that was boiled and a foam was removed from the top that was poured into a small cauldron. When that foam disappeared, it left you an oil. I used to fry that corojo oil with plantains, with little fish, to make food, because there was nothing to eat with. We made corojo oil to eat. It was a hard time what was experienced.”
“Nothing more than Friday, after five in the afternoon, until Sunday at one, was really what you were at home, once you graduated. You slept [at home] on Friday, on Saturday you slept and on Sunday you had to leave. That time was hard, the school time. At least for some seventh graders like me. So you had to work. You arrived, they woke you up at six in the morning, you had to dress in your country clothes, go to breakfast and from there at seven you were already working. You had to work in the fields, filling bags, planting seeds in a greenhouse, treating the orange trees, picking oranges, depending on the season, picking lemons, and you had to fulfill the established norms of the amount of boxes. When you are little, in seventh grade, eleven, twelve years old, then it is very exhausting. You arrived to school until eleven o'clock. At eleven and later in the morning they would bring you to school.”
“What I do remember... that one would get sick and had to travel very far away. Once, I remember that my aunt came with my cousins to the house, they always came all vacations. And then they slaughtered pork and I began to cut and peel yucca and I ate a few bites of raw yucca, hiding from them, because I liked it. And they gave me vomiting and diarrhea. And they had to go out with me in the middle of the party on horseback. Every five minutes my dad had to get me off the horse so I could relieve myself, vomit and diarrhea. They had to bring me on horseback to 23 and from 23 take an ambulance and go to Trinidad. And that's what I'm talking about, that it's about seven kilometers from the farm to 23, and about thirty kilometers from 23 to Trinidad, more or less. All that distance to be able to see a doctor. It was far...”
Juana González Jiménez was born on June 24, 1966 on a farm located in the countryside, more or less on the border between the municipalities of Trinidad and Fomento, in the central province of Sancti Spíritus, Cuba. She was the eighth child of rural workers who lived by growing coffee, bananas, beans, and many other plants. At the same time they kept pigs, cows and occasionally even goats. Juana grew up without having access to the technologies that were beginning to be used in cities at that time. In her house there was neither light nor television. The only thing that reminded them that in other parts of the world there was civilization was a small radio that was always listened to for a certain time to save batteries. Her sisters made dresses for her and together with all the other children of her marriage they played in the nature. The family moved quite frequently throughout the rural area between the cities of Trinidad and Sancti Spíritus. Juana studied at a secondary school where the children had to work in agriculture. When she was approximately fourteen years old, she met her future husband, with whom they live together without officially marrying. They have a son and a daughter. Throughout her life, Juana helped her parents in the fields and in the agricultural cooperatives. She later became a housewife and worked when she gave her time. Her husband is also a farmer. Juana’s life is an authentic testimony about life in the rural parts of the island of Cuba from the 1960s to the present. Juana is capable of differentiating between periods of relative economic boom, as happened in the 1980s, and the harsh reality of the Special Period. Although her life may seem unremarkable, she can tell us much about the daily struggles of Cubans in the countryside.
