Historian Daniel I. Pedreira exposes how Castroism literally erased those who opposed it.

14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, July 11, 2025 — In Los desaparecidos del castrismo, Cuba desde 1959 (The Disappeared of Castroism, Cuba since 1959), historian Daniel I. Pedreira delivers a work as painful as it is essential. Against the tide of silence imposed by the Cuban regime, Pedreira delves into one of the darkest and least documented aspects of the Island’s contemporary history: the forced disappearance of citizens opposed to Fidel Castro’s regime.
Through more than 600 cases, the author exposes how Castroism has used disappearances as a tool of repression and social control, publicly denying their existence while threatening and persecuting those who try to clarify the truth. Pedreira stresses that the majority of the victims were young people, which represents not only a human tragedy but also a mutilation of the future of the Cuban nation. The book aims to rescue their memory, break the imposed silence and pave the way for justice and national reconciliation.
The work is based on collaboration with organizations such as Archivo Cuba, the Instituto de la Memoria Histórica Cubana contra el Totalitarismo and the Asociación de Familiares de Cubanos Desaparecidos, as well as key witnesses. Despite the impossibility of accessing official documents of the regime, the author has managed to gather a solid basis of evidence with historical, judicial and forensic value. Pedreira hopes the book will reach international human rights institutions in order to dismantle the official narrative of continue reading
The author has managed to gather a solid basis of evidence with historical, judicial and forensic value
Far from being limited to political denunciation, the author builds a solid investigation that disproves the myth that ideological regimes like the Cuban do not commit extrajudicial crimes or systematic disappearances. Pedreira reveals how the absolute control of institutions has allowed Castroism to literally erase those who oppose it, often without leaving a physical or documentary trace.
One of the most moving cases is that of Andrew de Graux Villafaña, a young guerrilla fighter who, at just 18 years old, was wounded, captured and eventually disappeared by the regime’s forces. The history, reconstructed from family and medical testimonies, exposes the machinery of concealment and dehumanization that characterizes this type of regime. The tireless struggle of his sister Mary Louise, even decades later, is a symbol of moral resistance to institutionalized oblivion.

The work also includes the names and stories of other missing persons such as the brothers Pedrozo and Becerra, Orlando Collazo, Lázaro Fernández, Carlos M. Ibáñez and Alberto Sigas. Each case, accurately and respectfully reported, contributes to a portrait of collective pain that has been systematically silenced.
Pedreira points out that disappearances continue in present-day Cuba, either through direct repression or as a result of the conditions imposed by the dictatorship, which forces thousands of people to migrate along dangerous routes. Young people recruited for wars by others, migrants who disappeared at sea or in the jungle, citizens who never reached their destination: all of them are victims of a system that continues to take lives.
One of the book’s great successes is its dual approach. On the one hand, it provides concise data -dates, names, places- making it an invaluable source for researchers, historians, lawyers and human rights defenders. On the other, it does not forget the human component. Each entry is an act of memory, a symbolic tombstone for those who did not have a burial.
Disappearances continue in present-day Cuba, either through direct repression or as a result of the conditions imposed by the dictatorship.
The work is also part of a wider tradition of recovering historical memory in dictatorial contexts, as happened in former East Germany or in the Latin American Southern Cone.
Pedreira recognizes the limitations imposed by the regime’s permanence in power, but he establishes an ethical and historiographical starting point for the future.
The Disappeared of Castroism is a necessary book. Not only for its documentary contribution, but because it rescues from oblivion those whom the regime wanted to erase. With this work, Pedreira returns a face, voice and dignity to hundreds of Cubans who disappeared because they dreamed of a different country. As the author warns, many of them were young people, representatives of “the Cuba of the future,” and with them, a part of that future also disappeared.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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