Joy, relief, and worry in Boston with Castro gone

[MADem]

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/11/26/boston-area-cubans-remember-castro-with-mixed-and-complex-emotions/pKUDFjJbiDBdlOIBtouqyH/story.html?p1=Article_Trending_Most_Viewed

Nearby, inside Mr-V Auto Accessories, Cuban exile Eduardo Vasallo broke down in tears remembering what happened to his family at Castro’s hands. He escaped in 1962, at age 17, but three years later his relatives weren’t as fortunate.

His mother spent five years imprisoned and at hard labor for trying to leave in a boat that he had sent for her, using money he saved working at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, he said.

His sister, then about 11, was jailed for three or four months, he said. Cuban military fired into the cave where she was hiding with other people trying to escape.

“I’m very happy,” Vasallo, 72, said of Castro’s death. “I would have been happier if it had happened 50 years ago, before he killed so many people. … It would have saved my mother. It would have saved a lot of people who tried to leave Cuba in boats.”

After her release from prison, Vasallo’s mother came to the US through a program for political exiles. His sister and father came in 1980 through the Mariel boatlift, he said.....

......Lopez, who left Cuba in 1984, said the Cuban revolution wasn’t the achievement some leftists would like to believe.

“I personally know that revolution doesn’t exist. It’s not good for my countrymen,” he said. “Some people love Fidel, but they’re not Cubans. It’s easy to love somebody if you don’t live under them.”