“Anniversaries” of July that Castroism does not want to remember

HAVANA, Cuba. – In that turbulent summer of 1994, at the height of the Special Period, Cubans were at their peak in the face of shortages of all kinds, as well as the authorities’ refusal to implement real reforms to stop the crisis gripping society.

In this context, many Cubans chose to leave the country by launching themselves into the Straits of Florida, most of them illegally, in an unstoppable avalanche that reminded us of what happened 14 years ago, when the departures through the port of Mariel.

In the early hours of July 13 of that year, about 72 people boarded the tugboat “13 de Marzo” with the aim of leaving the Island. The port authorities, complying with the order from “above” to prevent the Cubans from escaping by all means, prepared to carry out the macabre mission that had been entrusted to them.

About seven miles from the Havana seawall, four government ships began to fire on the tugboat with water hoses in an attempt to sink the vessel. Nothing stopped the criminal action: neither the panic of the people who fell into the sea, nor the heart-rending cries of the mothers whose children were snatched from their arms by the gusts of water…

The death toll from the macabre incident was 41 people, including 10 minors. According to later statements by some of the survivors, the authorities did little to save the lives of some of the people who fell into the sea.

Several days after the tragedy, when it became known what had happened – because the regime, as it usually does in such cases, tried to hide the fact – the international community condemned the crime in harsh terms, while the Government described what had happened as “an accident.”

Years later, as part of its preferred role as victim, the regime inaugurated in the Havana neighborhood of Miramar a so-called “Memorial of the Denunciation,” with the objective of showing the “aggressions” of imperialism against Cuba. The migration issue occupies a prominent place in the memorial, since Castroism considers that the United States has used immigration policy as a weapon against the Island.

However, there is no place in the memorial to discuss the tragedy of the “13 de Marzo” tugboat that we are discussing here; nor to recall the repudiation rallies suffered by the people who entered the Peruvian Embassy or were leaving through the Mariel; nothing is said about the young people who lost their lives when the Castro batteries shot down the Brothers to the Rescue planes, whose only “crime” was saving the lives of many Cubans in the Florida Straits, and much less is there any mention of the three young people who were shot in 1994 for trying to hijack a boat to leave the country.

But that omission does not stop at all the evil of Castroism. Its cruelty reaches unsuspected limits when it has sometimes not allowed relatives of the victims of the tugboat to lay flowers on the Havana seafront on July 13. Henchmen of the so-called “Rapid Response Brigades” have been stationed near the coast to prevent Cubans from paying homage to their murdered brothers.

OPINION ARTICLE
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