Amina Guevara, one of the world’s most famous “sisters.”

She was not in the habit of holding meetings. She might spend more time with her family and friends than with people from her community. And while Amna and her sisters were involved in social justice from a young age, her husband and members of her extended family were not so involved. She knew that she too would need to “make the best of what I knew was left in me.”

And in the process she was willing to embrace community leadership. “I am willing to put myself under a very difficult situation if I need to because I believe in the cause for which I am fighting and in my ability to make change.”

Amina’s husband, Manuel Bien-Ary (left), is head of the Cuban Revolution Group, and her daughter Danyelline has a role as co-chair of the Cuban Revolutionary Communist Party.

Amina Guevara made her first revolutionary decision when a young woman started to question her and her brothers’ revolutionary views. She spoke up about an anti-Cuban flag drawn with the face of Fidel Castro – the man who had once been a political prisoner – that someone had displayed during a demonstration.

The woman’s message was that “people should respect freedom of speech,” but she said “that Fidel Castro was not an icon of freedom in her eyes.”

Soon she became a community organizer: in order to change Cuba’s educational system she took to the streets with thousands of others in order to force the government to open schools to all Cubans.

Later, she was president of one of Havana’s universities. She was the face of what she calls “the resistance” to the new government’s economic policies, which had pushed Cubans into poverty by turning the countryside into a dumping ground for sugar, which was extracted from the region’s soil and sold for a profit in the cities.

She saw that despite her personal struggles, she had been able to help others and she had done so because of the support of her supporters – the people who had been forced to leave their homes because of the policy changes. They, too, were taking part in the revolution, and so were Amna and her family, she said.

“I see no contradiction between being an activist and being a family member,” she said.

On her death, the whole community mourn