Eat and shut up...
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Orlando Enrique Castillo Miranda was born on February 20, 1960, in Río Cauto, the son of a local Afro-Cuban revolutionary leader. His father did not care much about his family and did not know how to protect his reputation, which resulted in the suicide of Orlando’s mother when he was only four years old. The loss of his mother left a deep scar on his soul. He would visit her grave and talk to her until someone came to take him home. He was a poor child who barely had the most basic clothes and made up toys from trash he found on the streets. At the age of 11, he was sent to an institution similar to an orphanage, where he had to deal with a high level of violence among the boys. Like most children, Orlando also became a pioneer, and the activities they did were among the few happy moments of his childhood. They would sing songs on television and go to the movies. Orlando studied to become a specialist in rice cultivation, which was very common in his hometown. His studies took him back to Río Cauto, but once he finished, he did not go to work at a rice mill. Instead, he started working at a sugar mill. Throughout his life, he participated in countless job drives organized by the Cuban regime, which recruited people for harvests and the construction of large industrial projects such as the Moa factory and the Juragua nuclear power plant. There he met Fidel Castro in person. Orlando became a member of the Communist Party immediately after finishing his studies and spent almost his entire life as an exemplary member of this group of the Cuban population. Accusations of anti-revolutionary behavior and crimes against Cuban law became a normal part of his life. He maintained his faith in the revolutionary process and remembers the 1970s and 1980s as a period of general abundance. However, over the rest of his life, he came to the conclusion that the revolutionary process had taken a wrong turn, that the revolutionary fervor and respect for the process had been lost. This was especially true after the death of Fidel Castro. In this regard, he confirms that the quality of life for Cubans today is even worse than during the Special Period.
