"IN the United States I experienced the crudest aspects of capitalism, when my husband was detained and isolated in Miami’s federal jail, leaving me unprotected and without any contact with him," affirmed Olga Salanueva Arango, the wife of René González, one of the five Cubans imprisoned in that country.

"In Cuba, before we went to the United States, I was the wife of a defector and I didn’t lose my rights, I continued to occupy the same senior administrative and political positions I held previously.

My daughter and I continued living in our own house in Cuba, nobody asked who I was and I was received all the rights granted to any Cuban citizen," René’s wife noted.

"Even when they knew at my daughter Irmita’s school that we were going through the procedures to leave the country, she was selected in her school as a youth leader on her own merits."

She related how, once in the United States, given that she didn’t leave the island on a raft but in a legal manner, "I was not benefited under the Cuban Adjustment Act. My first job was in an home for the elderly, collecting up the dirty sheets of people who had left Cuba many years before and had been abandoned." Olga recounted how her second job was selling cemetery plots.

"In those four years," she continued, "I did not have any of those famous benefits that certain companies give to some of their workers, I had no vacations or medical insurance.

"When I was pregnant I didn’t receive the benefits offered by my country to expectant mothers. Due to inadequate care I started to hemorrhage during the pregnancy, due to lack of money." She told how she went to a friend’s private clinic and the clot was removed without anaesthetic, so as not to damage the fetus."

Olga explained that when she went into labor with her second daughter, she was asked for a load of documentation in the midst of the labor pains. "The great right granted to my second daughter, Ivet, for being a U.S. citizen was medical insurance, but only to cover the costs of her first year of life.

"My daughter was diagnosed as having a heart murmur. René was already imprisoned in Miami, charged with being a Cuban agent," she recalls.

"I took my daughter to another specialist and he confirmed that the first diagnosis was false, a fraud so that we would have to pay for a risky operation, which could have cost her life.

"With René being arrested, I lost the house, credit cards, the car. I was deported without my American daughter, whom they sent to me later. Now," she commented, "I have been denied the opportunity of traveling to the United States with my younger daughter, who hardly knows her father.

"I am accused of being a terrorist. My history must be known in the United States. They are preventing me from going to see him with my younger daughter.

"I have every reason in the world to confirm that Cuban socialism is the most democratic in the world."