Juan Carlos González Alarcón

The Promised Paradise Juan Carlos González Alarcón

The failure of communism socialism in Cuba. The Paradise promised by dictator Fidel Castro was a Hell for millions of human beings who for decades lived in a Prison-Island. A people enslaved by an oppressive totalitarian regime that prohibited the most elementary right to manifest itself publicly and severely punished any kind of dissent. Where the only freedom that Cubans enjoyed, and which the socialist government allowed, as if it were an effective escape valve to the latent social outburst, was sexual freedom. Young women and young men, sisters and brothers, wives and husbands, brides and grooms, prostituting themself day and night in the Malecon and on the streets of Havana, in exchange for a few dollars. On the hunt for European or American tourists, islanders urgently needed to get easy money to buy the food with which to feed their families, whose pantries given by the communist system were insufficient for them. The extreme poverty in which millions of people lived, in houses and buildings in conditions of ruins, human degradation, loss of moral values and ethical principles, indoctrinated and alienated by a traumatizing ideology in schools, offices, factories, recreation centers. The use of lies and deceit as a social norm of conduct on the part of citizens as a defense response to the relentless "brainwashing" perpetrated by the castrista dictatorship. Youth without dreams, without ideals, without hope, without future, without options to escape into the freedom enjoyed by the inhabitants of the democratic countries of the Western World. The only novel that manages to recreate that stopped reality of the history of the world on the island of Cuba in the fifties of the twentieth century. A human society that no longer exists since the Caribbean country restored diplomatic relations with the United States on July 20, 2015.