My New Beginning / Yamil Dominguez

Some readers have written to me wondering how I recovered after a year of freedom. Well, it has not exactly been easy to start, I found a country with a critical economic crisis and especially in the field of construction.

I was also a victim of bank fraud and the perpetrators were two people whom I’d considered my friends and they had borrowed $15,000 and $23,000, money which they never repaid despite all the time I was in prison. I also built this supposed friend his house without having paid one cent of what was supposed to be a price of $35,000.

My advice to everyone is to take care, because those we think we can be friends with and who apparently want the best for us, can be turned into the worst unscrupulous opportunists. Other friends and family have told me that we know who the people are at your side when we are in prison or in a hospital, that’s true. I never thought a human being could be so evil and able to do things they wouldn’t even do to an enemy, much less to a friend, but with experience I learned, along with the bitter taste of the Castro regime.

All this forced me to start from zero. Now I am again working as a general contractor, with the highs and lows we are all suffering in this construction industry and in real estate, but it is progressing.

I still have nightmares when I sleep that I am a prisoner in this regime of terror, I dream that they have me in the punishment cell and I wake up very sweaty even with air conditioning. I think I will spend many years with such a nightmare though to forget it is what I most desire. I look at life positively, in this new opportunity, but I keep thinking of all Cubans in the country where we were born who can not aspire to the economic freedoms that I enjoy today, much less freedom of thought and expression.

It saddens me to remember that the country I was born repressed me by imprisoning me in the hardest conditions and punishment only for demanding my rights, judging me for the sad reason that I didn’t think what they thought. They didn’t even imprison me because they thought I wanted to rob a bank, which in this case would be to think about committing a crime, but it’s not a crime if you never execute it.

I was sentenced only for believing that for love I could have what I desired: freedom for my wife because today we are married in the United States, in this case it would be convicting someone for love, because this is not trafficking.

For three years they hid their approval of her visa until it was returned to me along with my belonging. They did not return the video camera that they signed for because it was stored so badly that it deteriorated, in its place they just gave me another of their promises. The boat was supposed to be returned to me, but they did not. Why?

Meanwhile, on arriving in the U.S. the immigration official who checked my U.S. passport asked when I left, by what route, and without asking anything else said, welcome home. What a difference!

Today I have my own company, I have my own construction businesses, and I wonder what would happen if I wanted to do this in Cuba? I am sure that I would end up being arrested and prosecuted for illegal enrichment.

Economic freedoms for Cubans are just one of the inflated balloons among so many other lies of the Cuban regime, like the supposed opening for the sale of cars, I still hope the typical Cuban can freely buy a Toyota or a Chevrolet to develop his business or company, or to go to and from work.

Every day that I enjoy freedom in all its aspects I find it very cruel that a regime fools its people and deprives them of their rights.

April 8 2012