Seventy-two people boarded the tugboat 13 de Marzo in hopes of escaping the hell imposed by the Castros. Among them were entire families, parents who wanted to offer their children a future. They never reached freedom.
They were intercepted, rammed and sunk at sea by vessels belonging to the forces of Fidel Castro’s regime. What happened that fateful morning was not an accident. It was a tragedy caused by human cruelty, by the cruelty of those who, obeying orders, decided that those lives did not deserve to be saved.
The monstrosity of what happened is revealed in the details. When the tugboat was on the high seas, the vessels that were pursuing it began to ram it violently. Desperate parents raised their children to show that there were children there. The response was even more brutal: jets of water fired from hoses so powerful that they tore them from the protective embrace of their parents, throwing them into the sea.
Seventy-two human beings were on board. Half were minors. Among them, children. Helen Martínez was barely six months old.
Six months, for God’s sake!
There was no mercy. There was no mercy. Only hatred turned into action and the absolute disregard for human life of those who followed the orders of a regime as criminal then as now.
The pro-government press reported that a tugboat had sunk next to the dock, supposedly because 72 people had climbed aboard and caused what they called a “capsize.” When I read that news, I knew something didn’t add up. A maritime expert explained to me that tugboats are particularly stable vessels and that the version of such a capsize caused by the weight of the passengers was difficult to sustain.
The official explanation sought to turn a crime into an accident and the victims responsible for their own death.
Even more painful was seeing that important international media, including The New York Times, reproduced the regime’s version and repeatedly used the word “stolen” to refer to the tugboat.
The regime was not satisfied with sinking the ship. He also tried to destroy the truth.
Some survivors were forced, from prison, to publicly accuse themselves. But the victims had names, faces and relatives. And, above all, they had a truth that could not remain buried at the bottom of the bay.
From Cuba, Fe Pimienta recounted the horror of the hoses. María Victoria García, who lost more than ten relatives, told how she tried to hold on to her son while the tragedy separated them. Janet Hernández described the attacks of the boats and the moment when, when the tugboat sank, a refrigerator miraculously appeared in the waters and allowed some survivors to cling to it.
Even then the persecution did not stop. According to testimonies, the patrol boats rotated violently around those struggling to stay afloat.
It was necessary to prevent the murderers from writing history.
When many of the survivors managed to leave Cuba, we at the American National Foundation took on the task of bringing their testimonies to the United States Congress, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and any institution willing to listen to them. Nothing would bring the dead back to life. But we knew that silence would be a second victory for those responsible for the crime.
Four years later, from the port in Havana Bay from which the tugboat had set sail, Ted Koppel began to tell the story and show the testimonies.
I felt that, at least for that night, justice had been done. The truth that the regime had tried to silence and that its allies had tried to cover up had managed to make its way to millions of viewers.
But memory cannot depend solely on a television report or on anniversaries that force us to return to the pain.
On October 10, Dr. Omar Vento reminded us precisely that. In a ceremony full of emotion and symbolism, he dedicated a bench to the victims on the boardwalk of the Ermita de la Caridad. There, in front of the sea, their names were read. The cries of María Victoria and the testimonies of Gustavo Martínez and his son Yandi were heard. A mass closed the day.
It is not simply a bank facing the sea. It is an act of resistance against oblivion. A place where the pain of families becomes collective memory and where future generations will be able to stop and ask what happened and why.
When Gustavo Martínez arrived from Cuba, he worked at La Voz de la Fundación. Sometimes I would pass by the glass of the study and see the tears running silently down her cheeks. No words were needed to understand that there are wounds that never heal, because there is a pain that remains intact: that of someone who has never found justice.
Why insist on justice? So that it never happens again.
Why refuse to forget? Because as long as one person speaks their names, as long as someone stops in front of that bench and asks who they were, the victims will not be forgotten.
Dr. Omar Vento has reminded us that a people cannot afford to forget. That small monument facing the sea represents much more than a tribute: it represents the moral obligation to transmit the truth, to defend freedom and to teach new generations that no ideology, no order and no government can justify the murder of defenseless human beings.
That bench will be much more than a place to sit. It will be a place to remember, to cry and to learn. So that those who enjoy freedom today can approach it and understand the price that others paid to try to achieve it.
Memory is a form of justice. Silence favors the executioners. And Cuba will not be able to reconcile itself with its history until justice is done.
So that never again will a Cuban have to jump into the sea to escape from their own homeland. So that hate never again decides who deserves to live and who doesn’t. And so that Cuba’s name will never again be stained by a crime as horrendous as that of the sinking of the tugboat 13 de Marzo.
