When I was 9 years old, just four years after my mother passed away, my father was sent to prison because he was an outspoken activist against the Fidel Castro dictatorship. For many years I had to endure the exclusion from social acceptance because I was the daughter of a counter revolutionary, in the eyes of the regime. My will to fight this type of government, capable of inflicting such unbearable pain in a child, grew stronger with the years, so I became a human rights activist myself. My childhood slipped through my fingers and I grew up in a hurry, only to marry a man who shared my same point of view against tyranny and oppression. He ended up in prison together with his father and my brother and my father (again) for the mere act of printing and distributing flyers against Castro's regime. Again I had to face the sad reality of being labelled a dissident in communist Cuba. The only difference this time was, I was not left alone. By my side was my little daughter Yessica, giving me strength to fight the communist dictatorship, that made my life a living nightmare. To my father Victor who spent more than 15 years in total, in Cuban dungeons. To my brother Emilio, my husband Guillermo Sambra and his father the Cuban writer Ismael Sambra. To my daughters Yessica and Gabriella.