To promote a peaceful transition to a Cuba that respects human rights
and political and economic freedoms
Cuban coast guard purposefully rams and sinks boat with fleeing refugees, killing seven including a two year old. Exposing some of the lies behind the UN embargo debate
From left to right and from top to bottom, Aimara Meizoso León, Elizabeth Meizoso, Indira Serrano Cala, Omar Reyes Valdés, Nathali Acosta Lemus, and Yerandy García Meizoso. (Collage)
On October 28, 2022 a Cuban coast guard ship purposefully rammed and sank a boat just north of Bahía Honda, in the province of Artemisa that was heading north to the United States with Cuban refugees. Héctor Meizoso, who lost three family members in the premeditated attack, spoke to 14ymedio.
“They had to have let it [leave],” he now reflects on the boat in which at least 25 people were trying to leave the country and reach the shores of the United States, seven of them have been confirmed dead and at the moment one is missing . “In any case, it was not the first and it will not be the last,” adds the young man, who confirms that several of the survivors are still being questioned by the police.
Marti Noticias interviewed Diana Meizoso, who was injured in the attack and whose two-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Meizoso, was killed. She described what happened, and the Miami Herald translated it into English as follows.
On Monday, Meizoso González told the U.S.-based Radio Marti that the Cuban coast guard officers intentionally hit their boat. The man at the helm of the speedboat “slowed down because he saw himself surrounded because another boat was coming,” Meizoso González said in an audio interview. “When we passed them by, [a Cuban coast guard officer] said: ‘Now I’m going to split them in half,’ and then he rammed us.” At that point, she said, she hit her head and lost consciousness, and her daughter slipped away. Other survivors interviewed by Miami station America TV provided a similar account.
Families of the victims, and the survivors are seeking answers to what will happen to those officials that carried out the massacre, but the dictatorship wants them to be silent.
The names of the seven victims are: Aimara Meizoso León, Elizabeth Meizoso, Indira Serrano Cala, Omar Reyes Valdés, Nathali Acosta Lemus, Yerandy García Meizoso, and Israel Gómez.
Israel Gómez, seventh victim of November 28th massacre.
This brutality against Cuban refugees by the Cuban government has a decades long track record. This is a partial accounting.
On June 28, 2022 Andrea Rodriguez, of the Associated Press based in Cuba, published the report "Cuban troops report fatal clash with Florida speedboat," and it raised concerns. When officials of the Cuban dictatorship made claims "they have intercepted more than a dozen speed boats arriving from the United States [in 2022] — including two shooting incidents and at least one death." Their claims should not be taken at face value. This made their statement that "U.S. authorities have handed over a suspect in the shooting of a Cuban coast guard officer" deeply troubling, if true.
On March 26, 2016 "seven Cuban migrants, all with gunshot wounds, were interdicted at sea and taken to south Florida hospitals," reported The Guardian, adding thaat "the US coast guard’s public affairs office told [ the Keynoter ] newspaper the wounded were on a makeshift raft with another 19 migrants, who were not injured."
Yuriniesky Martínez Reina (age 28) was shot in the back and killed on April 9, 2015.
Yuriniesky Martínez Reina (age 28) was shot in the back and killed by state security chief Miguel Angel Río Seco Rodríguez in the Martí municipality of Matanzas, Cuba on April 9, 2015 for peacefully trying to leave Cuba. A group of young men were building a small boat near Menéndez beach to flee the island, when they were spotted trying to leave and were shot at by state security. Yuriniesky was left for two days in the lagoon, before being found by his brother.
On July 13, 1994, a group of Cubans, including children and women, tried to escape from Cuba aboard the "13 de marzo" tugboat. State Security forces, and four Transportation Ministry boats of the Cuban government intercepted the "13 de marzo" seven miles off the coast of Cuba, with water jets from pressure hoses knocked people off the deck, tore the children from the arms of their mothers and sank the tugboat. 37 people were murdered, 11 of them children.
In 1993 U.S. officials charged that Cuban marine patrols repeatedly tossed grenades, strafed fleeing swimmers with automatic weapons fire, and recovered bodies with gaff hooks, within sight of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Clinton Administration filed a formal protest to the Cuban government regarding the brutality visited on Cuban migrants. According to the U.S. protest, U.S. military guards surveying the bay witnessed five separate incidents:
* On June 19 at 2 p.m., U.S. guards, startled by the sounds of detonations, saw Cuban troops aboard patrol boats dropping grenades in the paths of several swimmers headed for the U.S. base.
* On June 20 at 1:30 p.m., Cuban troops repeated the action, then strafed the water with machine-gun fire.
* On June 26 at 11 a.m., three patrol boats surrounded a group of swimmers, lobbing grenades and spraying them with automatic weapons fire. At least three corpses were lifted out of the water with gaffs.
* On June 27 at 11:30 a.m., guards aboard patrol boats lobbed two grenades into the water.
* The same day, just before 3 p.m., a patrol boat opened automatic fire on a group of swimmers, who were later seen being pulled from the water. The swimmers' status was unknown.
In 1980, Fidel Castro began by insulting those seeking to leave as “scum” and “worms”, and he took children and youth out of school to take part in acts of repudiation. According to Carlos Alberto Montaner, the students killed a teacher that they had discovered running away. Forty Cubans who simply wanted to leave Cuba were lynched. This would become known as the Mariel boatlift.
A 1995 monograph by academics Holly Ackerman and Juan Clark, The Cuban Balseros: Voyage of Uncertainty reported that “as many as 100,000 Cuban rafters may have perished trying to leave Cuba.”
This latest massacre is not being debated at the UN Human Rights Council or at the UN General Assembly; instead, the Cuban government today and tomorrow will use all its influence to push through a resolution condemning the U.S. embargo, and the propaganda push has already started.
Megan Janetsky of the Associated Press reports that "18 former Latin American and Caribbean leaders have signed a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden asking the United States to remove its six-decade embargo on Cuba in the wake of devastation inflicted by Hurricane Ian."
But if you scratch the surface, the lies and the sordid underlayer begin to be exposed.
In the article she quotes former Colombian President Ernesto Samper Pizano, but fails to mention his ties to the Cali drug cartel, or the February 1, 1996 murder of Elizabeth Montoya de Sarria, who President Samper "in taped conversations called the ''crafty little blonde.''' She was gunned down in "the apartment of two Cuban witchcraft artists," reported the Christian Science Monitor at the time. She was suspected of having information that would have brought down Samper's presidency.
Some inconvenient facts
In 1962, President John Kennedy placed an economic embargo on Cuba. Over the next 30 years the Cuban dictator ridiculed U.S. sanctions prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Fidel Castro, speaking at the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in December 1975 bragged “at first their (the United States) cancellations were quite annoying ... but when luckily, we did not depend on them for anything, neither in trade, nor in supplies, nor in anything. If we are already victorious now, after victory, what can they threaten us with? With canceling what ... what? "
Fidel Castro in an April 1985 Playboy interview said: "The United States has less and less to offer Cuba. If we could export our products to the United States, we would have to start making plans for new production lines ... because everything that we produce now and everything that we are going to produce in the next five years has already been sold to other markets. … The socialist countries pay us much better prices and have much better relations with us than we have with the United States.”
Castro’'s annual campaign against the embargo at the UN General Assembly began in 1992 when Soviet subsidies ended, but by then there had already been several large scale exoduses that could not be attributed to sanctions impacting the dictatorship.
The Castro regime continues to call the United States economic embargo on Cuba a "blockade." This is not true as the State Department (and U.S. - Cuba trade statistics over the past 20 years) demonstrate.
A meme appeared on social media in Spanish that outlines this reality, and Cuban scholar and journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner on July 15, 2021 gave a commentary on the blockade not prohibiting a series of economic measures that are proscribed by the Cuban government. Below is a translation to English of the above mentioned meme.
"The blockade does not prohibit fishermen in Cuba from fishing, the dictatorship does;
The blockade does not confiscate what farmers harvest, the dictatorship does;
The blockade does not prohibit Cubans on the island from doing business freely, the dictatorship does;
The blockade did not destroy every sugar mill, textile factory, shoe store, canning factory, the dictatorship did;
The blockade is not responsible for Cubans being paid with worthless pesos and stores sell you products with American dollars; the dictatorship is;
The blockade is not responsible that Cubans are beaten and imprisoned for thinking differently, the dictatorship is;
The blockade is not responsible that there are hundreds of Cuban political prisoners who have not committed any crime, the dictatorship is;
The blockade is not responsible for sending Cubans US dollars that they give to you in worthless pesos in the Western Union, the dictatorship is;
The blockade is not responsible for the dictatorship building hotels and the roofs that fall on Cubans' heads, the dictatorship is;
The blockade is not responsible for hospitals in Cuba that are disgusting, the dictatorship is;
The blockade is not responsible for not having water in homes, for not maintaining the aqueduct system, the dictatorship is;"
The United States does not have a "blockade" on Cuba, but porous economic sanctions with a focus on cutting off funds to the military that controls most of the Cuban economy. What the meme does reveal is that there is an "internal blockade" on Cubans imposed by the Castro dictatorship.
This also includes a blockade on visiting prisoners.
Havana does not permit international or domestic oversight of prison conditions, good statistics on its overall prison population are difficult to come by, and officials infrequently provide data on prisons. This data cannot be independently verified. The UN Committee Against Torture on April 29, 2022 reported that the Cuban government had not provided prison population figures since 2012. The information that is provided sporadically is misleading.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) over the past 63 years only had access to Cuban prisons between 1988 and 1989. In contrast the ICRC visited the U.S. Guantanamo detention facility over 100 times since 2002, when the United States began housing prisoners, and during those same 20 years the Castro regime permitted zero visits of the ICRC to Cuban prisons.
The U.S. government is sending the wrong signals
The Castro dictatorship issued a new draconian penal code on May 15, 2022 to further clamp down on free expression and free assembly. Regrettably, the next day the Biden Administration announced it was loosening sanctions on Havana. This sent the wrong signal to the Castro regime.
The response is more repression against Cubans in the island combined with more requests to the United States for lifting sanctions, and assistance.
This provides more resources to the dictatorship to repress, killing Cubans, while seeding anti-Americanism among Cubans.
It is a bad policy for the United States and the Cuban people, but great for the Castro dictatorship, and other enemies of the United States.
The Castro regime has funds to help Cubans in need, but does not make it a priority.
Families from La Coloma, the fishing village in Cuba where Hurricane Ian entered the island, had been living in temporary shelters since Hurricane Lili destroyed their homes in 2002. Twenty years later, and they still have not received the assistance promised by Havana Over those same two decades, Castro's military conglomerate GAESA, which had only 10% of the tourism market with less than 4,000 guest rooms in the 1990s, was transformed into the undisputed leader of the hotel sector, with over 100,000 guest rooms. GAESA has become the major investor, wielding such financial power that, contrary to MINTUR’s own entities, it never has to accept the participation of foreign capital in its hotel construction plans.
Havana pleads poverty while the Castro family and the military oligarchy that run the country get rich and use the Cuban populace as hostages to shakedown the international community.
The dictatorship in Cuba is a criminal regime that murders Cuban migrants, and cannot be trusted. It has held on to power for 63 years, and successfully exported its repressive model to Nicaragua, and Venezuelacausing refugee outflows from those two countries as well.
Time for Western democracies to stop subsidizing the Castro dictatorship, and giving it resources to kill Cubans.
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