Reports I Would Prefer Not to Write / Luis Felipe Rojas

Photo: Luis Felipe Rojas

When I dictated this post this morning to a friend who has always been aware of my aspirations and having and maintaining my blog from Holguin, she told me, and here I want to record it in writing, “You never thought you were going to face, from your writing, a ‘reality’ that the Great Nobel Winner Mario Vargas Llosa would say, “sometimes is stranger than fiction.'”

In just a few months I have received, from the small town of Banes along the northern coast of my province, reports that fill me with sadness. Here is one of them:

The citizen Yosdani Pavón Espinosa was shot in the right thigh last October 1st of this year, by the police officer Vladimir Camejo, chief of the Cañadon in Banes sector of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR).

Mrs. Marta Díaz Rondón told me that the police abandoned to his fate the young man Pavón Espinosa, who was operated on without having the bullet removed, and who was admitted to the surgical clinic of the hospital in Banes under heavy police guard.

The account of the victim’s family complained that the criminologist reconstructed the facts of the case based on the testimony of the aggressor, Camejo’s, nephew, without conducting any alcohol testing (both the official and is relatives are well-known alcoholics).

Marta went on to say that the office Vladimir Camejo already has one shooting death on his record and three whom he has wounded in the same way. One of them is a young driver who didn’t want to pick him up in the truck he was driving and as a “punishment” he received a bullet.

“Despite these facts,” Díaz Rondón told me, “the military has never been warned by the police chief in Holguin. Six citizens were willing to speak on behalf of the victim, Pavón Espinosa, and to testify that he had been abandoned by the aggressor. Among them were Juan Carlos Cruz, Julio Gómez y Héctor Hidalgo.”

“These incidents include that of Mariblanca Avila, Cari Caballero Batista and Marta Díaz Rondón herself, when they tried to show support for Reina Luisa on Sundays, but neither the responsible agencies, nor the high priests, nor the Cuban police listened, as I have told you. There has been no punishment nor reprimands for the uniformed aggressors. Much less for the non-uniformed personnel who were see, allowed, and participated in the ‘tumultuous feast.'”

What will happen the day that a bullet “escapes” from one of these bestial crusades that is launched every Lord’s Day against the family of Orland Zapata Tamayo?

*Hours after Luis Felipe dictated this post he was arrested in his house in San Germán. The motives for the arrest are unknown at this time, and also a violent repression has been launched in Banes against the opponents who accompany Reina Luisa to offer tribute at her son Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s grave.