Ricardo Torres

I am Cuban.

Born and raised.

But you're not in Cuba now.

I'm not in Cuba.

I left Cuba almost five years ago.

Even the poor in Cuba

They had the basics covered.

Yeah, like shelter, like through the rationing book, sufficient food.

And then you could always send your children to school and you were taken care of if you got ill because health care was accessible and free of charge.

I mean, the Soviet Union disappeared when I was 10.

Moral reserves in a way that, OK, socialism does work.

We just had now bad luck.

We were abandoned.

We were left behind by these countries, traitors, as they would put it in Cuba.

But we'll figure it out and we'll go back to that period of well-being.

Well, perhaps reality is a little bit different from what I saw in the book.

The reality is that they had little freedom.

in making important decisions when it comes to production, prices, and all kinds of things that we would associate with free enterprise.

Cuba started providing services to Venezuela.

Venezuela sent oil.