The Day I Became a Refugee
By Dorisbel Guillen (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – The world outside went on as usual. The grandmother’s son washed his jeep; the granddaughter put away a bicycle. Inside, I stopped recognizing myself. I read the ruling from the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) and felt my legs give out, so I collapsed into a black chair. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, only the coldness of knowing I had become someone else remained.
Iguar, the small town in Sancti Spíritus where I was born, now felt farther away. Its streets, its voices, its smells, the train station… My former life no longer belonged to me.
Until then, being an emigrant had seemed like just a word. The thorough analysis that Mexican officials sent me by email revealed the judicial, political, and civic weight of a decision that pulled me away from my deepest loves and, at the same time, returned me free and valid.
Ten years had passed since I had been professionally segregated in Cuba for writing for El Toque. And three since I had arrived in Guadalajara to study. I looked out through the wide window facing the church and reread Comar’s investigation. The “sin” that had self-condemned me to a life in the dark was beginning to dissolve.
Each validated argument, each instance of psychological torture—endured in silence and now named—was like a degree of heat released from my body, fragments of my essence finally returning to me.
When I finally began to cry, I called my lawyer and my closest friends, who had accompanied me—legally and spiritually—to take the step, even when I didn’t believe I deserved this redemption.
I am a journalist and have conducted many interviews throughout my career, though they could have been more if not for the fear I lived with in Cuba. I listened to lives that still remain within me because I never wrote about them—out of fear of rejection and censorship.
I won’t deny it: I also interviewed officials and politicians shielded by a slippery ideology, built on broken foundations and wrapped in speeches we broadcast on state radio as if they were truths. More than once I confronted them, torn between frustration and defiance, but at some point, I also believed in them, as I had in many other doctrines.
Becoming a refugee meant embracing the opening between liberation and memory, accepting the distance. A necessary break that brought me back to myself.
In Cuba, I lived through a week of interrogations that marked my life, where every word and gesture was evaluated. The “meetings” would be announced the afternoon or evening before, for eight the next morning, at the headquarters of the provincial radio station in Villa Clara. Even though they always summoned me at that hour, they often arrived late or could even leave me waiting the whole day.
Sometimes members of the management of the municipal station where I was on staff would accompany me, though I worked at both. Inside, I could find myself with my former director—once a colleague and mentor—alone or accompanied, either by staff from the station or outsiders.
I was also told an officer would speak with me, though I never figured out exactly when it happened, since they usually dressed in civilian clothes. During those days, many people approached me, urging me to retract.
In Mexico, the interview at Comar was intense but revealing. It lasted several hours and forced me to relive all those difficult episodes. Each question about my texts, my ties, and my silences confronted me, but also offered a space for release. The officer who listened to me became my confidant and a pillar of emotional relief, helping me shed the deep guilt of having defended who I am.
Today, being a political refugee is not just about having fled—it means accepting a farewell that is not chosen. It means living with your country’s stagnation, with the slowness of its changes, with the collapse of those who once held hope. It means accepting that your story is no longer told from within, but from outside. And that this outside, though freer, also hurts.
It is to begin a life knowing that your past was difficult to build, and that little of what you built will be recognized abroad. That your credentials, your achievements, your years of work may become invisible.
You miss what never happened. The children who went to live on Saturn, because you refused to be a mother in a country with no future. The loves you didn’t stay to fight for, because all you wanted was to breathe.
You miss sitting with your grandmother, chasing lights in the sky. “If it moves, it’s a plane.” “If it’s still, it’s a star.” “Look, there goes your uncle!” And I knew she wanted to see her son, who lived in the city. When this memory seizes me now, I no longer need to explain it.
But being a refugee also means opening the wound of traumatic memory and finally draining it—fainting, sweating the fever, expelling it, and crying it all out at last.
The day I became a refugee, I returned to the memory of the office of the CMHW radio director in Santa Clara, to that fateful week, to the blank sheet of paper. They asked me to explain why I had written what I wrote, why I had collaborated with outlets that weren’t official.
They didn’t shout or threaten, but they knew how to make you feel guilty. They spoke to me about ethics, commitment, the homeland, as if I had betrayed something sacred.
They summoned my senior colleagues. They weren’t told the reason for the meeting, which created confusion for them and for me about their role.
In the end, there was no firing. Just a blank sheet and a pen. Hold on: “I will write, calmly, my resignation.” And I did, though I walked out of there with a numb conscience.
From then on, the atmosphere of tension became constant: every look, every gesture. I never knew for sure who was really watching. The pressure, akin to the dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale, haunted my life every time I found work.
At the Provincial Book Center, for example, they had me rebuild a bookstore in ruins “to test me.” And they fired me when I refused to sell books without an inventory.
At the Provincial School of the Arts, they dismissed me with the excuse that there were too many Spanish teachers, while telling my students that I had left for a job that paid more. I remember that day I stood in front of the mirror where I rented a room and cut my hair with old scissors.
I wish I could say I stood firm, that I kept writing, but I didn’t. Over time, the constant surveillance and fear made me doubt my voice and taught me to silence myself to survive. And it became increasingly impossible to work. I sold pizzas, took shifts, cleaned houses, cared for the senile father of a “pastor” who never paid me a cent. Until I gave in and once again accepted the heavy arm of the state on my shoulder, sacrificing the integrity of my dreams.
That afternoon when I received Comar’s ruling, I began to somatize the redress. There, facing the window that looked out on a church, in the beautiful Jalisco home that welcomed me like family after signatures, demonstrations, and long waits. For the first time, after years of therapy and life in Mexico, I let myself simply be.
Times no longer ask me to be silent. They ask me to speak. And that is what I try to do. Not as a journalist. Not as a refugee. But as a woman and citizen who has paradoxically found her freedom and personal safety in a country that ranks among the most violent in the world.
Meanwhile, the prisons in my own country swell. There, in the country of Eyes, where political and conscience prisoners suffer beatings and constant medical neglect.
Today, more than before, violence in Cuba is psychological terror, inverted morality, the sign of a distorted patriotic value. It is a vocation to constant sacrifice, to (un)worthiness, to the subjugation of rights and the stripping of the self, while they repeat to us that outside everything is worse.
For that reason, and much more, Cubans feel like refugees in Mexico, in Haiti, at the North Pole.
At this point, after many Cubans have swallowed fear alongside hunger—both physical and spiritual—perhaps this chronicle may seem like an exercise in pity or forced justification. But it isn’t. It is a statement of guilt, the kind that neither Comar nor the interrogations in Cuba nor my psychotherapist nor the silence I once chose to survive can absolve me of.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.