“In the second meeting [at Boca Ciega in 1958], I remember, I was the one who used to pour coffee. I was sixteen years old in 1958. But I knew how to do... All of us, since we were little, we all knew how to cook, because my father said that a man who couldn’t cook was lost. And my mother taught us all to cook. And I specialized precisely, as it was also my addiction – and still is – I was able to prepare good coffee. And in that second meeting I remember that I prepared the coffee... And at that time there was no difference between salt and refined sugar. And I put salt in the coffee. And I remember that I brought the coffee to the first person, and the one who tried the coffee was Raúl [Castro]. ‘Ewww!’ he spat it out and said: ‘This coffee is salty!’ I said: ‘Oh, I’ll make you another.’ He said: ‘Look, he wanted to poison us, I’ll put him in jail!’ And it turned out afterwards that they really did put me in jail. And that was a stage that I... Well, as I say to people: ‘I did not cause the victory, but I saw how it was being accomplished.’”
“Later on, I remember, because I was being critical, very critical, and above all with him. I had enough confidence to raise any problems that I had, any ideas that differed from his ones. I had enough confidence with him to raise them. And I remember that I once told him [his father, Blas Roca, ex-leader of the Cuban Popular Socialist Party – ed.], he was already sick, or he was soon going to die. And I told him that the Constitution was shit. And I remember his words: ‘It’s not the best Constitution that we could have made, but inside, there are elements to be improved by those who are coming in our footsteps.’”
“And so there [in the assembly of the year 1991], is where I made, as I described it to a friend of mine, my first official statement as a dissident. Because I was already in contact with many dissidents, like Elizardo [Sánchez], like [Oswaldo] Payá, like Héctor Palacios, but I had not made an official statement. And there, in that assembly, I remember saying: ‘And I want to make clear that I do not agree with any of what is happening here, and I am going to do everything in my power and through the media that are as close as possible to Socialist legality, to this legality that I do not agree with, to change the system.”
“It was a weird period. In the first place, there was no information here. We, as pilots, we learned thanks to the Cuban pilots who studied in Czechoslovakia. We were among the first to hear about the Prague Spring, which brought serious consequences to the people here in Cuba, who supported the Czechs who were asking for freedom.”
Vladimiro Roca Antúnez was born in December 1942 in Havana, Cuba. His father was Blas Roca Calderio, secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba. In his youth, Vladimiro followed the same ideological line as his father, he even personally witnessed the meetings in Boca Ciega where Fidel Castro and his men planned to overthrow Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. After an aviation course in 1961-1963 in the Soviet Union, Vladimiro began to work as a pilot at the San Antonio air base. It was there that he began to doubt the regime, when he was ordered to intercept a civilian craft. The approval of the 1976 Constitution caused another notable change in his opinion. In 1987 he graduated from a night course for International Relations workers at the Superior Institute of International Relations and in the same year his father died. In 1991 he made his first official statement as a dissident, in 1992 he founded the Democratic Socialist Current, and in 1996 he was one of the founders (and the current president) of the Social Democratic Party, which until today has not been recognized by Cuba. In 1997 he and other dissidents created the Working Group on Internal Dissidence to Analyze the Cuban Socio-Economic Situation and prepared the document The Homeland Belongs to Everyone, for which he was arrested (together with its other authors); he was in prison from 1997 to 2002. In 2010 he attended the funeral of the dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo in Banes, who died after an 85-day hunger strike. Vladimiro resides in Havana and continues to fight against the Castro regime.
