"We demonstrated Žilina, because we were caught. We were setting Russian flags on fire. The students were kinda crazy, in sixty-nine, sixty-eight. And I was in one group, which was caught and arrested. In the morning the superintendent came. Until then they didn't do anything to us, they just put us behind bars and waited for the superintendent and the investigators to come in the morning, because the normal police officers were forbidden to talk to us. And now this superintendent came and he said, 'What did you write up, who did you talk to?' We said, 'Nobody. We were just making a mess. We were against the Russians and their arrival, we are young.' And he said, 'What did they do to you? Did you write a protocol with somebody - with somebody here last night?' 'No.' 'Did you do anything here?' 'No.' So the superintendent came and said, 'Well, be quiet about it. We're not writing anything down, get up and go home.' And he said to me: 'You're in Žilina, you'd still get away with it.' I said: 'Why?' 'There you only get a conditional expulsion from the university for these things. But if it was in Prague in the Czech Republic, they would have expelled you immediately.'"
"I was on the Ďumbier mountain in the Western Tatras at the time. We were in university training, that was in 1968. We were walking up those mountains and towards morning we saw the Russian fighter planes, Mig-15s or whatever, many of them. And pretty high up. The weather was beautiful, so it was very visible. And we didn't know what was going on. We went there and some cottager says, 'Don't you know what's going on?' And we say, 'No we don’t, what's going on? It's not maneuvers.' 'The Russians attacked us.' So that's when the cottager started pouring free beer for everybody there, even though it was quite expensive. It was so wild, I still remember it, those fighter planes flying."
Jaroslav Kubín was born on November 25, 1947 in Poličná near Valašské Meziříčí. His father, Ferdinand, was forcibly deployed in Germany during World War II, where he witnessed several sabotages. After finishing elementary school in 1963, Jaroslav commenced his studies at the Railway High School in Šumperk, where he was introduced to Western music, such as The Beatles, and fashion, which at that time was beginning to penetrate to Czechoslovakia. After graduating from high school in 1967, he was accepted into a university in Žilina, where he participated, together with other students, in a protest burning of Soviet flags in 1968 in response to the August Warsaw Pact invasion. After a brief arrest, he and his friends were released without further consequences. Jaroslav eventually interrupted his studies due to family reasons and in 1970 he was accepted into the Faculty of Law at Charles University, where he also successfully graduated. He first worked as a train driver and at the end of the 1970s he joined Tesla in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm as a corporate lawyer. He joined the Communist Party and worked his way up to deputy of the commercial department. Two months before the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Jaroslav Kubín became the chairman of the National Municipal Office in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. As a former member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, he withstood the revolutionary changes of 1989 and after free elections he served as mayor of the town for three more nonconsecutive terms. In 2000 he became an independent senator for the Vsetín district and a representative of the Zlín Region. In 2021 he lived with his wife Miroslava in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.
