Born and raised in Cuba, Gabriela Blanco knows first hand what it’s like to lose your freedoms.
Now she’s spreading the word to high school and college students about not taking your liberties for granted. Blanco spoke to juniors and seniors at Odessa High School Friday in the Performing Arts Center.
Advanced Placement macroeconomics teacher Debbie Boyd said more than 1,000 students were expected.
Blanco came through the Dissident Project, which is a nonprofit speakers bureau connecting immigrants who fled tyrannical regimes with American high schoolers, its website said.
The Dissident Project contacted Boyd about bringing a speaker in. She contacted her administration, which approved it. She hopes to make it an annual event.
“This will be our first time with it,” Boyd said. “We’ve not worked with the Dissident Project before, but they have like 22 different speakers.”
Blanco and her husband, Daniel, have a 7-month-old daughter, and live in Austin. Her husband is from Caracas, Venezuela.
Blanco, who is from Havana, said she and her husband are testimony speakers for Gideons International.
“He’s a Gideon member, and so we’ve gotten the opportunity to travel around and share our life stories and our stories of faith, and also some of our background that brought us here,” Blanco said.
Daniel arrived in the U.S. in 2018 and she arrived in 2019.
They will be married three years in December.
The couple met through work. They work at a sports field construction company.
Friday, she shared her life story with students, what led her to leave Cuba, what the situation was like — and still is like today.
The country still faces shortages of food, medicine, water, fuel, electricity with blackouts for days at a time, and mass migration.
“I’m here today because I’m hoping to inspire the new generation to appreciate the freedoms that they have and enjoy and how important it is to protect those freedoms,” because once you start giving them up, it’s a slippery slope, she said.
“Whatever we can do to make people realize what happened over there and to keep that from happening over here, that’s really what inspires my husband and I to continue doing this and raising awareness regarding our home countries,” Blanco added.
She still has family in Cuba, but the economic and political situation prompted her to leave.
She showed photos of her family, children sent by themselves out of the country on rafts, photos of priests and nuns deported because they were religious and her school textbooks that promoted war and dying for your country.
“We lost freedom of enterprise, we lost freedom of religion, we lost the ability to raise our own children, because the government does that for all of us. It was very clear since I was little. My dad always wanted to leave and for us to have a better life and better opportunities and so my siblings and him came here, and then I was able to join them,” Blanco said.
“The three of us, we were apart for 10 years until we reunited here,” she added.
Blanco said it was difficult to leave home.
“There is no place like Havana; stopped in time. There’s your people, and then sadly, you come to a different place. You are able to enjoy all these freedoms — freedom to work and prosper and raise a family the way you see fit. It is very different, because we would not be able to do any of that if I was still in Cuba; just … talking about being anti-government people are doing sentences of 20 years for that back home,” Blanco said.
She noted that Cuba is near to her heart and leaving people behind is not easy.
Blanco said there are churches in Cuba, but religion is looked down upon and restricted.
“The first Christian church that I found, that was my first contact with people of faith, the first time I heard about God. … My husband was brought up Catholic, I was brought up an atheist. We still had some questions, both of us, and we had never rediscovered that relationship, or discover in my case. Funny enough, we were involved in a small car accident in 2020. I was driving, and I got out of the car it was just a tail light from the truck in front of us, and it turned out the person driving, it was a member of the Gideon’s International.
“As I got out of the car, I was expecting all kinds of screaming from from this person, obviously, because I just damaged their brand new truck. Instead of that, he was waiting there with two testaments. He just took that opportunity to share the good news with us,” Blanco said.
“That was the beginning of a friendship that continues to this day. We found our way to church. Eventually, we got saved, got baptized,” Blanco said.
Her husband is a Gideon and so they had a chance to travel and speak to people from their generation about the organization and God, she said.
As soon as Castro came to power, they banned Christians for 30 years because it’s a religious celebration.
People of faith could not join the Communist Party and the government took measures to make sure that people didn’t know about God or hear about God. It came down to the regime being God.
“They placed themselves as the idols that you had to worship. That’s … what our life stories are about, pretty much, is reminding people that if you remove God from the center of your life, you’ll place anything else, and then it’s very easy for for this kind of ideologies to slip through that,” Blanco said.
There is free education and free medical care in Cuba, but you wind up paying for it.
“It’s all about worshiping the figures of the revolution; worship in Fidel Castro. They teach you about guns and war and how you need to die for your country. That’s just the way you’re brought up. … You are brought up as a little soldier, to stand up for your country and for their interests. That’s pretty much how you’re paying for those careers that are supposed to be free with your kids’ lives and your kids’ minds, not to mention once you graduate, like, university, let’s say you have to work for two years wherever they send you to. If you hope to leave the country, you have to wait a certain amount of time. Like, if you work in medical, you have to wait five years. If you work in law, you have to wait five years to even be allowed to exit the island. It is a prison, and of course, it’s not free. They take all of your money. They take all of your freedom. It’s pretty different from over here,” Blanco said.
She left Cuba on a work permit and was able to go to the Cayman Islands. She worked as a waitress at a hotel restaurant. Her family was here, but she had to wait 10 years to join them.
“I had to wait for my residency permit to come through. Of course, we wanted to do things the right way, and we had to wait for that, and we did. That was a decade-long separation, waiting to reunite with them,” Blanco said.
She added that she has found Texas to be “the absolute best state” for the number of opportunities you have to get a business started.
“My husband is an entrepreneur. We got here four years ago; we had absolutely nothing and the fact that you are able to do all these things here, you are able to work, you are able to send your kids to school, the school of your choice, if you want to. You can work in whatever you choose to work in, and all of that is so different from where we come from, so there will be, even though it’s all differences for the better, there will be an adjustment period, but Texas is, for sure, … a spectacular place to come to and just to get started in life,” she said.
OHS seniors Belen Morales and Melanie Jimenez were among those listening to Blanco and found it eye-opening.
“I think the way she’s speaking about it just shows how mature she had to be to go through all that, and how hard it must have been having to accept that she was leaving her family … I’m glad that she got through it,” Morales said.
She added that Blanco knows what’s happening in her country and there’s no getting away from it.
“I just think that’s very difficult for anyone to do, and she speaks about it with such knowledge … I think it’s really strong of her. She’s very inspiring,” Morales said.
Jimenez said the presentation was very educational. She said there are a lot of misconceptions about Cubans, especially in West Texas.
“But I think at the same time, she just showed that not all of them are bad and that they actually have their own real-world problems that they are going through that we don’t take the time to stop and realize, and we just automatically, as humans, just try to judge without finding out the full story,” Jimenez said.
