“Cuban History” series · Season 1, episode 1
In the early hours of July 13, 1994, seventy-two people left the port of Havana on an old tugboat. Forty-one died that night. Ten were children.
The Ministry of the Interior called it, in writing, “the accident that occurred as a result of the attempt to leave the country illegally.”
Two years later, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reviewed the case, heard the survivors, asked the Cuban Government for its version, and wrote this:
“The evidence clearly shows that the sinking of the tug ’13 de Marzo’ was not an accident but rather a premeditated, intentional act.”
This article is about the distance between those two sentences. And about a man who was asked to stand behind the first one.
What happened
They sailed at around three in the morning. The boat was called “13 de Marzo” and belonged to the Maritime Services Company of the Ministry of Transport.
That detail usually gets lost, and it is the one that orders everything else: the boat they were fleeing on belonged to the State, and the boats that came after them belonged to the same company. This was not a military pursuit. It was a state company going after its own tugboat, with people inside it.
They had barely left the bay when two vessels began to follow them. About forty-five minutes out, seven miles from the coast, at a spot sailors call “La Poceta,” two more appeared, fitted with tanks and hoses.
The maneuver is described in the case file with each boat named. The Polargo 2 blocked their path from the front. The Polargo 5 rammed them from behind and split the stern. The other two took the flanks and began firing pressurized water at the deck, which was exactly where the women and children were.
Survivors testified that they held the children up so they would be seen. That they were lit with floodlights, that they were seen, and that it continued.
One survivor, Janette Hernández Gutiérrez, nineteen years old, pointed in her testimony to the detail that makes sense of the distance:
“They just let us leave the bay and attacked us seven miles out, where there were no witnesses, for, as you know, out in the open sea there are no witnesses.”
Many of those who died did not drown in open water. They died because the water pressure drove them to take shelter in the engine room, and from there they did not get out.
When the tugboat went down, the four boats kept firing water at the people swimming. They picked up nobody: they told them to swim toward the coast guard.
Survivors also testified that “all the while there was a coast guard cutter observing the situation, without doing anything about it,” and that “the ones who were chasing us were in civilian clothes, many of them weren’t wearing a shirt either.”
Thirty-one people survived.
What the State said
In March 1995 the Cuban Government’s Interests Section replied to the Commission. It did not send an investigation of its own, or an expert report, or a forensic finding. It sent two things: a copy of remarks Fidel Castro made to the Cuban press, and a communiqué from the Ministry of the Interior.
The communiqué maintained that there had been a collision between the tugboat and another vessel from the same company trying to capture it. That there was a prior report stating the “13 de Marzo” already had holes in it, that those fleeing knew it and “irresponsibly” failed to repair them. That three vessels had tried to intercept it. That two coast guard cutters arrived immediately on rescue duty. And that if only thirty-one people were saved, it was because of the state of the sea.
It ended with a sentence worth reading slowly: “The main leader has been imprisoned.”
In other words: forty-one people died that night, and of those who came out of the water alive, one went to prison.
| What the Ministry of the Interior said Communiqué sent in March 1995 |
What the Commission established Report No. 47/96, October 1996 |
|---|---|
| There was a collision with another boat that was trying to capture it. | The sinking was not an accident but rather a premeditated, intentional act. |
| The tugboat already had holes in it and those fleeing “irresponsibly” failed to repair them. | A survivor testified that “there was no leak anywhere,” and that the Government pressured him to say otherwise. |
| Three vessels tried to intercept it. | There were four, two of them named: the Polargo 2 and the Polargo 5. |
| Two coast guard cutters arrived immediately on rescue duty. | The four boats kept firing water at the people swimming and picked up nobody. |
| If only thirty-one were saved, it was because of the state of the sea. | Forty-one people died, ten of them minors. |
The man they asked to lie
The entire official version rests on a single point. If the boat was taking on water from the moment it sailed, then it sank on its own and what happened was a misfortune. If it was not taking on water, it sank because they sank it.
Arquímedes Venancio Lebrigio Gamboa survived. And he testified before the Inter-American Commission that the Cuban Government pressured him to say exactly that: that the tugboat was taking on water from the start.
He testified that it was not true. That when the boat sailed he was in the lower part of the vessel and could see with his own eyes that “there was no leak anywhere.” That he went up on deck and saw them rammed at the bow and the stern. And that when the pursuers shouted that the tugboat was sinking, they answered no, that if they wanted to they could make it all the way to China.
Arquímedes Lebrigio lost a son that night.
The body was never returned to him.
A man in that situation, with a son under the water and a body the State is holding, has every reason in the world to say whatever he is told to say. He went to an international body and said the opposite.
That, for me, is the center of this case. Not the cruelty of that night, which is enough on its own. What came after: somebody needed this to be called an accident, and went looking for a broken father to sign off on it.
How many died, and why the figures do not match
This calls for precision, because if you look this case up you are going to find different numbers, and it is worth knowing why.
You will read 41, you will read 40, you will read 37, and in Amnesty International’s 1997 report you will read “at least 35.” I have seen a single news article headline with 37 and cite 41 three paragraphs later. You will also find people who say sixty-eight were aboard rather than seventy-two.
It is not that some are lying and others are not. It is that different things are being counted.
The Inter-American Commission’s case file speaks of 41 dead, and in listing them names 37 and states there were “four more victims who could not be identified.” That is where the two most widely circulated numbers come from: 41 is the total, 37 are the ones with names.
Amnesty International, which works to its own and very strict verification threshold, spoke in 1997 of “at least 35.” That is not a smaller figure: it is a floor.
On this blog I use 41, and the reasons are these: it is the figure from a formal case file, the one that came out of a procedure with both parties summoned, and the only one accompanied by a list of names. The Cuban State had three months to dispute it and did not.
And I say this for another reason too. When you are documenting a dictatorship, the temptation to round upward is always there, and it is exactly what they need in order to discredit you. Forty-one is enough. Not one more is needed.
What the Commission ruled
Report No. 47/96, case 11.436, approved on October 16, 1996, found the Cuban State responsible for three violations of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man:
The right to life of the 41 people who died. The personal integrity of the 31 who survived, on account of the trauma. And the right of movement and the right to justice of the 72 who tried to leave.
And it recommended three concrete things: investigate and punish those responsible, recover the vessel and return the remains to the families, and compensate survivors and relatives.
What happened next
Nothing.
The Commission first approved a confidential report and sent it to the Cuban Government in May 1996, with three months to respond. The Cuban Government did not respond.
It had not sent a representative to the September 1995 hearing either, though it was invited. Two survivors did go to that hearing, to tell what they had seen, in front of an empty chair.
The report was published for precisely that reason: because the State neither complied with the recommendations nor replied.
Thirty-two years later, nobody has been prosecuted. The tugboat is still on the sea floor. The families still do not have the remains.
Nobody was prosecuted. The survivors were
Here the Commission’s case file falls short and you have to go elsewhere. In 1997 Amnesty International documented what became of the people who came out of the water alive, and it is not what you would expect for victims.
Twenty of the men who survived were detained. Most spent around a month in custody before being placed under house arrest. Amnesty names them one by one, and on that list there is a name you have already read: among those detained was Arquímedes Lebrigio Gamboa.
Read that again. The man they asked to lie, the man whose son’s body was never returned to him, was also detained. And even so he went to an international body and said the opposite of what the State needed to hear.
One note, because this article lives on your being able to check it. The case file spells this surname two ways: Lebrigio in the body of the report and in the lists without ages, and Lebrijio in the two lists that do carry ages. Amnesty International transcribes it a third way, “Ledreijo.” It is the same man in all three. I say so because if you cross-check and cannot find him, it is not that I made him up: it is that the document does not agree with itself.
One of them did not get out after a month. Raúl Muñoz García spent eight months in custody, accused of being responsible for the tugboat and of having organized the escape. He was twenty-three. When Amnesty wrote its report he was still under house arrest, harassed and under police surveillance.
Now read again the sentence the Ministry of the Interior used to close its communiqué: “The main leader has been imprisoned.” A survivor told Amnesty that Muñoz was only the second in command, and that the man who was in charge had drowned that night.
So the State did not merely call what it had done an accident. It jailed a man for eight months and presented him as the ringleader, when according to someone who was aboard, the ringleader was among the forty-one.
The survivors who stayed in Cuba remained under police surveillance, with their freedom of movement restricted.
Not even a minute of silence
That is not a figure of speech. It is in the report.
A Mass for the victims planned at the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was suspended by the authorities and the church was closed. People were briefly detained for wearing black armbands in mourning. And on the second anniversary, in 1996, Aida Rosa Jiménez was told to pray at home, and warned that if she tried to go to church on that July 13, she would be arrested.
Amnesty sums it up this way: survivors still in Cuba, and those who have tried to establish the facts or simply to commemorate what happened on July 13, have suffered intimidation and harassment, and have been repeatedly warned not to speak publicly about it.
Thirty-two years later, the anniversary is marked every July 13. But it is marked in Miami, on social media, in exile.
A country where you cannot hold a minute of silence.
The names
The case file does something the Cuban State has never done: it names them.
Leonardo Notario Góngora (27) · Marta Tacoronte Vega (36) · Caridad Leyva Tacoronte (36) · Yausel Eugenio Pérez Tacoronte (11) · Mayulis Méndez Tacoronte (17) · Odalys Muñoz García (21) · Pilar Almanza Romero (30) · Yaser Perodín Almanza (11) · Manuel Sánchez Callol (58) · Juliana Enriquez Carrasana (23) · Helen Martínez Enríquez (6 months) · Reynaldo Marrero (45) · Joel García Suárez (24) · Juan Mario Gutiérrez García (10) · Ernesto Alfonso Joureiro (25) · Amado Gonzáles Raices (50) · Lázaro Borges Priel (34) · Liset Álvarez Guerra (24) · Yisel Borges Álvarez (4) · Guillermo Cruz Martínez (46) · Fidelio Ramel Prieto-Hernández (51) · Rosa María Alcalde Preig (47) · Yaltamira Anaya Carrasco (22) · José Carlos Nicole Anaya (3) · María Carrasco Anaya (44) · Julia Caridad Ruiz Blanco (35) · Ángel René Abreu Ruiz (3) · Jorge Arquímides Lebrijio Flores (28) · Eduardo Suárez Esquivel (39) · Elicer Suárez Plascencia · Omar Rodríguez Suárez (33) · Miralis Fernández Rodríguez (28) · Cindy Rodríguez Fernández (2) · José Gregorio Balmaceda Castillo (24) · Rigoberto Feut Gonzáles (31) · Midalis Sanabria Cabrera (19).
And four more victims who could not be identified.
The ages are in the case file too, and they change how the list reads. The youngest victim was six months old. Helen Martínez Enríquez. Cindy Rodríguez Fernández was two, and she appears right after Miralis Fernández Rodríguez, twenty-eight: mother and daughter. Lázaro Borges Priel, thirty-four, Liset Álvarez Guerra, twenty-four, and Yisel Borges Álvarez, four: father, mother and daughter. Yaltamira Anaya Carrasco, twenty-two, José Carlos Nicole Anaya, three, and María Carrasco Anaya, forty-four: three generations.
For Elicer Suárez Plascencia the document gives no age. I leave it that way.
And there is a count that does not add up, so I will point it out before someone else does. The case file states that ten of the dead were minors, but only nine can be counted in the named list. The tenth is either among the four victims who could not be identified, or is Elicer Suárez Plascencia, the only one whose age is not recorded. I do not know, and I am not going to pick one.
Read the surnames again, slowly. Tacoronte appears four times. Anaya, three. Suárez, three. Borges, twice. Perodín, twice.
Forty-one separate people did not die. Families died.
And there is a surname on that list you have already read further up, somewhere else.
Jorge Arquímides Lebrijio Flores, twenty-eight years old. He is the only one with that surname among the forty-one.
The case file does not say he was his son. It says three things separately: that Arquímedes Venancio Lebrigio Gamboa survived, testified, and lost a son whose body was never returned to him; that among the dead there is only one man with that surname, who also carries the father’s name; and that the survivor was fifty-two and the dead man twenty-eight.
I am not going to assert what the document does not assert. I leave the facts where the case file left them, side by side.
Why I open the series with this case
This series starts from a simple idea: Cuban history is not told badly from the island. It is told by halves. There are whole episodes that go untold, and many of us Cubans do not know they happened.
I begin with the 13 de Marzo for three reasons.
The first is that there is a case file. This is not an exile’s word against an official’s. It is an international body that opened a case, summoned both parties, heard testimony under procedure, and published a conclusion with a date, a number and names. The Cuban State had the chance to defend itself. It chose not to use it, twice.
The second is that the official version is inside the document itself. There is no need to reconstruct it or assume it or interpret it. It is right there, in its own words, and it can be set against what those on board testified, sentence by sentence.
And the third is the word. The regime did not deny that forty-one people died that night. It chose a word: accident. The whole machinery, the ministry’s note, the pressure on a grieving father, thirty-two years of silence, exists to hold up a single word.
That is what this blog is for. Not to shout louder. To keep that word from standing.
Next episode. It is recorded: the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown: February 24, 1996, the four men killed in the planes, and a federal indictment thirty years later.