Naděžda Hubáčková

* 1947

  • "And I'm in Cuba, so of course the tropics, and I brought these orange pants from there. At that time, we wore, as they say, tights, and I arrived with orange pants, narrow, short slits above the ankle on the side and a zipper on the butt. Well, of course, Jesus, hooray for nice pants, so I wore them to the first day of school, but now I had time... The construction site has two staircases, the central one and then the side one, and I asked the janitor in the booth downstairs what the janitors always sat where the 1st SA was, and he told me, up those stairs and the third door. And I reached the middle of that staircase, on that landing, on that one shoulder, and Professor Vašek Doubek was rushing towards me, then I found out who he was, and he saw the orange pants, and he sent me home to change normally, that I am dressed indecently. I couldn't understand it, I was normally shocked by it. So not only am I late for the date, but I was also late because the professor didn't let me go to class and threw me out of school to change my clothes."

  • "Once we even flew in a helicopter, an old Dakota. It had a propeller, then a guy walked in, first he takes a repair key like that, then he has this and he tells you that nothing is happening, and you are somewhere high above the sea, so you think to yourself: Lord God, this can't turn out well. Well, it was an incredible experience. And the biggest thing was that when we landed, behind that glass wall in Havana at that airport, my mom was standing, whom I had never seen in my life wearing such a great dress and high-heels, Italian stiletto ones, chewing gum. Baby, I normally thought I was going to pass out because we used to chew so bad spruce or pine here, and she had gum! I thought I was going to die.“

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    Praha, 25.11.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:35:43
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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I was shocked by Cuba

Naděžda Hubáčková in 2021
Naděžda Hubáčková in 2021
zdroj: Post Bellum

Naděžda Hubáčková, née Fikrlová, was born on December 30, 1947 in Prague as the first of two daughters of Marie and Václav Fikrl. The father worked in the brewery in Smíchov, the mother worked as a saleswoman. My maternal grandfather had coal store in Žižkov, where he employed Jewish boys during the war and thus protected them from transports. The communists took away his business in the 1950s. When Naděžda was three years old, the family moved to Hradec Králové, where her father got a job in a brewery. Here she started elementary school. She was involved in puppet theater, swimming, basketball, fencing and later classical and historical dance. In 1962, the parents went to Cuba, where the father got a job as a brewer. They also lived through the Cuban crisis here. For the time being, Naděžda and her younger sister Milena lived with their grandparents in Blatná in South Bohemia, then they moved to Havana with their parents for three and a half months. After returning from Cuba, Naděžda entered the Secondary School of Construction in Hradec Králové, where she graduated in the field of civil engineering. When Czechoslovakia was occupied by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, Naděžda was with a friend in West Germany. She managed to extend her visa and returned home only in September 1968. In the 1970s she worked as a construction budget accountant, i.e. very freely back in the days. She was interrogated several times by the State Security because of a friend who fled to Italy after 1968. In 1989, she welcomed the fall of totalitarianism with enthusiasm and hope, she was slightly less happy about the breakup of Czechoslovakia. Already in the nineties, she got involved in municipal politics and was elected mayor of Rybitví, where she lived at the time. She held the position for the next twenty years.