The exiles keeping vigil over their dead: Florida Cubans left confounded after the attack on a US speedboat

They haven’t seen the bodies, nor do they know if the ashes will arrive in South Florida, but Cuban exiles have begun to honor their dead. They have been doing so for decades — keeping vigil from afar over the bodies of family members who died far away, or who drowned at sea.

At the memorial altar for the victims of Castro’s regime, they have now placed the names of Pavel Alling Peña, Michael Ortega Casanova, Ledián Padrón Guevara, and Héctor Duani Cruz Correa.

People have begun to dedicate words to them, to write short obituaries, and even the occasional online epitaph calling them “heroes” or “patriots,” or telling them that they were the ones who did what so many others have not dared to carry out.

People are still reeling from the shock of seeing four of their own dead after a boat was sunk by the Cuban Coast Guard.

“The news devastated me. It was a very sad loss, of young people who longed to see the island free,” says Diasniurka Salcedo Verdecia from her home in Miami.

She can’t stop thinking about the families of the four people who died in the incident on Wednesday, February 25, off the coast of Villa Clara, and is worried about what the government might do to the six injured people who are now in its custody. “There are six of them in their hands, and they will probably take exemplary measures,” she says.

The Cuban government once again took violent action against its own people — Cubans — in the ongoing political struggle it has always maintained against its exiles.

Amid the tension over Washington’s potential plans for Cuba, Cubans learned from the Cuban Interior Ministry about an attack on a speedboat with Florida registration FL7726SH that had approached within one nautical mile northwest of the El Pino channel in Cayo Falcones, in the center of the island. People were stunned. What did such an incident mean in the context of Donald Trump’s statements about destabilizing the Cuban government?

As the hours passed, the Cuban government — the only party so far controlling all the information about the incident, which involved eight residents and two U.S. citizens — gradually released the names of the victims. According to the Cuban authorities, it was an attempted infiltration for terrorist purposes. According to the official information released, some of those involved, such as Leordan Enrique Cruz Gómez and Amijaíl Sánchez González, had already appeared on the national list of persons and entities under criminal investigation and wanted by the Cuban authorities.

Niurka Préstamo, Sánchez González’s former partner, can’t believe that the Cuban government is labeling him a terrorist. She describes him as a “family man, a good man, who doesn’t talk much, a homebody, a hard worker.” “I don’t understand why the regime insists on calling him that and denigrating him in every way. He’s simply another Cuban, like all of us who fight for Cuba, who longs to see a free Cuba, who can’t stand what the regime is doing to the people,” she says.

She looks through photos of her ex-partner, who earned a living pruning trees. In some, he’s wearing his safety vest and helmet; in others, he’s holding a saw, always working. “These young men are men of character, with principles, with dignity. The Communist Party is the terrorist, the one that has terrorized the Cuban people, that has more than 1,000 political prisoners and children crying for their parents, that has an entire nation starving and people dying for lack of medicine. That’s what it means to be a terrorist; Amijaíl Sánchez is a good man.”

In another of Préstamo’s photos, Sánchez González appears with a Cuban flag bearing the initials A.D.P (Autodefensa del Pueblo, or People’s Self-defense in English), the organization around which exiles were allegedly organizing, along with others on the island. For some time, there had been reports of boycotts, anti-government posters, and even fires in Cuba carried out in A.D.P’s name, which had made the group a target of the Miguel Díaz-Canel government.

Cuban rapper Eliexer Márquez Duany, one of the authors of the song Patria y Vida, recently spent time with some of the people involved in the speedboat incident. He didn’t have any special ties to them, but, he says, they were ordinary people — Cubans like the ones you meet walking down Calle 8 or getting a haircut in a barbershop in Hialeah. Some were construction workers, others laborers, and one was even a poet and photographer. That is why he has been so shocked to see their faces in the news. “For me, it was truly an act of madness. They weren’t prepared; I don’t know what their strategy was,” he says.

Between disinformation and political debate

Hours pass, and the families still know very little about the dead and the injured. They were unaware of the plan, and the news, like everyone else, has left them in shock. From Cuba, the family of Leordan Enrique Cruz Gómez is on the verge of despair. They say they know nothing about Cruz Gómez, and no authority has approached to confirm whether he is alive or dead.

The widow of Héctor Duani Cruz Correa, who was in Puerto Rico when she found out, threw her hands up in disbelief. “He is the noblest, most wholesome person, and all he does is work,” she told the local press.

Michel Ortega Casanova’s brother feels how the freedom he so desperately longs for has cost his family their lives. “This battle has to end. Today it was my brother’s turn, and those who fell alongside him,” he said.

Many ​​questions still surrounds the incident, which has also dominated the political debate. From Cuba, some have rejected the arrival of the exiles who, according to officials, came equipped with “assault rifles, handguns, homemade explosive devices (Molotov cocktails), bulletproof vests, telescopic sights, and camouflage uniforms.”

There are also those who have criticized the Cuban government for labeling the incident as “terrorism,” when the exiles were arriving in Cuba in the same way Fidel Castro arrived armed on December 2, 1956, at Las Coloradas beach with 82 expedition members from Mexico on the yacht Granma — the journey that marked the start of the guerrilla campaigns that removed Fulgencio Batista from power.

Miryorly García Prieto, a Cuban historian and activist, considers it “great hypocrisy” that “a government that came to power through armed struggle now delegitimizes it.” However, while she expresses “respect” for the exiles who came to liberate the country, she does not share the idea of ​​armed struggle. “I am a defender of peaceful means; I believe that armed struggle has also been encouraged by the Cuban government.”

Some say the group of exiles may have been “betrayed,” not only because of the Cuban side’s quick response, but also because earlier this month Díaz-Canel stated at a press conference that he was aware of “plans for terrorist acts that are being supported, financed, and prepared in the United States.” Others are still questioning whether the U.S. will carry out an independent investigation, as stated by Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American secretary of state.

The truth is that, despite decades of hostile relations between the U.S. and Cuba, the Trump administration not only responded slowly to the news but also issued cautious statements amid what appears to be ongoing negotiations between Washington and Havana. It wasn’t until Friday that Trump, under persistent press pressure to comment on Cuba, said that his government might be able to carry out “a friendly takeover” of the island. It remains unclear what exactly the president meant by these statements or what his intentions might be.

What worries many Cubans now is how long it will take for the public to learn the truth about an event they do not want to be forgotten, like so many other acts of violence that have become part of history. Some, even today, are demanding proof of life for the six survivors.

“No one has seen either the survivors or the victims,” says activist May Díaz from Houston, who adds that the incident is full of unanswered questions and unresolved issues.

“There’s too much silence amid all the noise. The other thing is: what official proof do we have that the injured are alive right now, at this very moment, or which hospital they are in? The truth is that, at this moment, the only thing we have is a list that contains errors, which makes me distrust everything. Until I hear the families say, ‘I saw my deceased relative, I saw my family member in the hospital, or I had some contact with them,’ I’m staying skeptical.”

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