Personal Narrative Essay: The Inner Voice

The Inner Voice When I was four years old my father left home. Not only he changed neighborhood or town but he left the country. It may seem that I was too young to notice his absence, but the truth is that this changed my life completely. I was quite close to my father and even today I can remember the emptiness that I felt in my chest. At four years of age I did not realize that behind the story of his departure was one of the greatest life lessons that he taught me. The year was 1991. We lived in Cuba, a communist country with a dictatorial government. My father was a young communist who had recently returned from studying in the Slovak Republic, which was part of the former Soviet Union. The year 1991 was an important year in

He was a young newly graduate in Nuclear Chemistry who loved his job at a nuclear research institute. That meeting was very particular. A man who worked at the institute decided to stand up and express a number of issues that in his opinion, were to be changed in the country. That man started saying that the president of Cuba had to be changed because he had been many years in power despite the many mistakes he had committed. If one knows how totalitarian governments work, you can understand how was the reaction of those who presided the meeting. They wanted to punish the man immediately because he had offended the leader of our country. Everyone was afraid to speak in defense of that man because they knew that they could lose their jobs. At that moment my father left behind all his fears and decided to protest against what, he thought, was an injustice. My father explained that it was not fair to punish someone only because he express his opinion, even if that opinion was wrong, they also had to admit that the man had chosen the right place to make his claims. What was the value of those meetings if people were not allowed to speak their