Chapter 13: Guanabacoa (August 1994), The Cubans

CHAPTER 13 GUANABACOA

August 1994

After Jorge García tossed flowers into the surf at Alamar on Fidel’s birthday, he could no longer hold on to any delusions about the horrors of the night the tug was sunk. Even though no bodies had ever been recovered, and the government made no attempt to bring the wreckage of the 13 de Marzo to the surface, fourteen members of his family were gone. For good. The finality of it came home to him when he was summoned to the office that oversaw the government’s supplemental food program. Spike’s wife, who ran the office in Guanabacoa, demanded that he sign papers officially removing Joel, Juan Mario, and María Victoria’s husband, Ernesto, from the libreta even though death certificates had never been issued for them, or for any of the victims.

His final words to his youngest son, “We’ll see each other in eternity,” haunted him as conditions on San Sebastián became more oppressive. Rapid Response Brigades continued to harass him and his family. María Victoria was fired from her job at the store in Guanabacoa where she had worked with Ernesto. Jorge was not allowed to teach, drive, or take any job with the state. He was even expelled from the local rescue squad. Guanabacoa, where he had lived his entire life, had become a prison cell.

But he was determined not to give in. He still had his golden voice and the tape recorder he’d brought home from Africa, and he used both to eke out a living selling recordings of popular songs and hosting girls’ quinceañeras. La Flaca was still by his side, her grief so great that it strained her weak heart almost to breaking. He still had María Victoria, though it was difficult to imagine how she could go on with her life in anything like a normal way after the nightmare she’d been through. And he still had his dogs, even after he was stripped of his position as vice president of the canine sports club.

Jorge felt that he owed the dead justice. It was painfully clear that the government wanted only its version of the incident to be known. Getting the truth out would take an extraordinary effort. María Victoria continued to tell her story. In an interview with the Washington Post a few months later, she said that she thought Fidel really believed that what had happened was an accident because all of the people around him were lying to him. “He needs to know the truth, that this was murder.” Jorge understood that his daughter couldn’t shoulder all responsibility for spreading the truth by herself. He’d have to get involved. He wasn’t looking for revenge, but it was important that the voices that had been silenced be heard. The damning testimony that Granma had attributed to some of the survivors couldn’t be left as the only record of the crime. He knew of only one way that the true horror of that night could be known and that someday—no matter how long it might take—justice would be achieved.

He took out Joel’s Chinese bicycle and began his quest for truth. He knew many of the people who had boarded the 13 de Marzo, and he was familiar with every street and alley in Guanabacoa. Slowly, over the course of weeks, then months, then years, he tracked down the stories of all sixty-eight people who had boarded the tug. Sometimes La Flaca went with him, riding sidesaddle on the bicycle frame. He gathered photographs of all those who had drowned and managed to get some details from their families so they would be remembered as more than just names. He found out that the youngest victim, Hellen Martínez Enríquez, who was six days shy of six months old when she drowned, had dark eyes like her father and a white birthmark on her thigh. The oldest, Manuel Cayol, was a retired steel worker whose adult children were already living in the United States when he boarded the 13 de Marzo.

Jorge pursued every one of the thirty-one survivors. Some didn’t want to talk to him. Susana Rojas Martínez was only ten when Jorge sat with her in her home. Her hands were shaking as she recalled how the tug sank so quickly that her mother, Daisy, and three-year-old little sister, Dadney, fell off one side, and she fell off the other. “When I grow up,” she told Jorge, “I’m going to be a lawyer so I can defend people who have problems.”

It took Jorge three attempts to find the tugboat’s skipper, Raúl Muñoz, and when he finally tracked him down, Muñoz made it clear from the outset that what happened was no accident. “In no country of the world, in no ocean, in no sea, anywhere, from the point of view of navigation should one vessel try to approach another. In no circumstances and for no reason. And less so if the vessel being approached is transporting people or worse, children, some only months old.”

The twenty-five-year-old skipper did not mince words. “It was a massacre. They decided in advance to sink the 13 de Marzo, not to stop it.”

Sometimes Jorge had to use guile to get past the Rapid Response Brigades that kept watch on the homes of survivors to prevent them from talking. When he pedaled over to the apartment of Gustavo Martínez Gutiérrez, a thirty-eight-year-old electrician who had tried to help Muñoz open the hatch on the 13, Jorge had to tell a small lie to find him.

“Excuse me.” He approached two older women in the neighborhood where he believed Martínez Gutiérrez lived. “Look, I just returned from Moscow and I want to see the family of a friend from work. But I’ve been away two years and I don’t remember the address. I was here once, but now all the buildings look the same.”

“What is this person’s name?”

“Gustavo.” Then he added, “And his wife’s name is Yuliana.”

The women looked at each other skeptically, then one told him to follow her.

Jorge had to wait several hours until Martínez showed up and reluctantly agreed to talk. He described listening to the screams of the people trapped below as he desperately tried to help Muñoz open the deck hatch, knowing that his own wife and infant daughter, Hellen, were down there. Only his son, Yandy, ten, had survived. Martínez was an electrician, not a sailor, and he had never had his head below water. He said the Polargos circled the wreckage of the tug, taunting them: “This is what you wanted!” He finally reached the floating cooler where his son was hanging on. When the boy saw him, he began to cry, asking where his mother and sister were. Martínez told him they were okay and had been picked up already. But he knew differently.

In interview after interview, Jorge heard the same story. That no one had cut any chains or drugged anyone to get onto the pier. That the other tugs had acted aggressively toward them right from the start, using their water cannons as weapons. That after their tug sank, the other crews did nothing to help. One survivor brought Jorge to tears again. Jorge Luis Cuba Suárez, known in the neighborhood as Pimpi, was with Jorge’s son Joel in the hold of the tug when it was rammed. Joel took off the silver chain with a medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe that he wore around his neck and asked Pimpi to hold it for him, maybe in a premonition that he wouldn’t make it out. Pimpi safeguarded the medal in his pocket just as seawater flooded in. He managed to get to the metal staircase and climb out in time.

Joel did not.

Pimpi was hauled off to prison with the other survivors. The day after he was released, he visited the house on San Sebastián and handed Jorge the medal.

Along with his interviews, Jorge gathered information to refute the government’s argument that the condition of the 13 de Marzo had doomed it from the start. He talked to a graduate of the naval academy who argued that the tug could not have been 115 years old as the government claimed. Regardless of its actual age, its wooden hull had to have been well protected for it to still be in the water and working in the busy harbor. The articles in Granma claimed that with more than sixty-five people aboard, the 13 de Marzo was grossly overloaded, an argument that Jorge found ironic. He, along with every Cuban his age, knew that in 1956 Fidel and Raúl had crossed the Gulf of Mexico in a grossly overloaded fishing yacht named Granma with eighty-two men and arms, ammunition, fuel, and food aboard.

The Granma had a wooden hull.

MARÍA VICTORIA GARCÍA SUAREZ’S POWERFUL interviews with foreign correspondents had no noticeable impact on Cuban officials, but they helped trigger investigations outside of Cuba. In January 1995, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard the testimony of survivors who had managed to escape in the months following the sinking. Despite knowing that there might be reprisals against their families in Cuba, several gave damning accounts of the government’s actions. Sergio Perodín, who had celebrated a birthday, along with Ramel’s Doberman, the night the 13 de Marzo pulled away from the dock, pushed off in a homemade raft a few weeks later. He was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and taken to Guantanamo before being allowed to enter the United States.

Perodín told the committee that while he was at the base, he met a man who said he was the carpenter who had worked on the 13 de Marzo in the months leading up to the departure. Perodín said the carpenter told him that the government had prepared the Polargos to go after any vessel that was commandeered. “And if any tugboat were to try to go to freedom,” the man had said, “the orders were to sink it.”

The Organization of American States (OAS) heard testimony from several survivors, including Arquímedes Lebrigio, who had lost his twenty-eight-year-old son Jorge in the incident. In Granma, Lebrigio was reported to have said the tug sank because there were too many people on board. “It was overloaded,” the paper quoted him as saying. “It was very old and made of wood. When I got on it, I realized that it wasn’t going to hold out. Whatever happened there would have happened a few miles farther out to sea.”

Shortly after the sinking, Lebrigio made another attempt to escape Cuba, this time on a raft. Like Perodín, he was intercepted and brought by the U.S. Coast Guard to Guantanamo, and eventually to Florida. Seated before the OAS commission in 1995, he told quite a different story from what Granma had published. He said government interrogators had pressured him to say that the tug had sprung a leak. He had been below deck when the 13 de Marzo weighed anchor and did not see water leaking in anywhere. In his view, the old tug could easily have made it to Key West if the other boats hadn’t attacked it.

The OAS faulted Cuba for not attempting to recover the bodies of the victims, even when the Brothers to the Rescue group offered to fly over the area to spot debris. When it asked the Cuban government for its version of the sinking, a response came from the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, which took the place of a Cuban embassy while diplomatic relations with the United States were suspended. The seven-paragraph statement concluded that blame for the “unfortunate accident” lay solely with the leaders of the expedition.

Amnesty International called on the Cuban government to launch a thorough investigation and make its findings public. When that didn’t happen, Amnesty conducted its own investigation and, in 1997, several years after the sinking, issued its conclusions:

“Given the grave accusations of the survivors, the contradictory official accounts of the incident, and the failure of the Cuban authorities to carry out a full and impartial investigation and to make the findings public, as well as the fact that those seeking such an investigation or even simply to commemorate the incident have faced intimidation and harassment, Amnesty International believes that there are serious reasons to doubt the official version of events.” The group discounted the government’s explanations that the workers on the pursuing tugs had acted on their own. It was likely an official operation, Amnesty concluded, and “those who died as a result of the incident were victims of extrajudicial execution.”

Despite the broad range of condemnations, the Cuban government never veered from the position outlined initially by Fidel and then, in a speech two weeks later, by Raúl Castro, who was then head of Cuba’s armed forces.

“We reject with all our energy the hypocritical and venomous anti-Cuban campaign orchestrated around this incident,” Raúl defiantly declared. “And we reject any interference in the internal affairs of our sovereign country by the United States or any other country. The State Department, the Congress, or President Clinton have no right whatsoever to meddle in an event that is the exclusive jurisdiction of the sovereign government of the Republic of Cuba.”