“We Family Members Have Been Banned From Posting on Social Media Because Enemies Take Advantage of It To Harm the Country”

The “Explosion process” at Melones is still “active” and “it is still not possible to go in,” according to the authorities.

The government reported that it has “protected” several hundred people residing in the vicinity of the facility / Facebook/Joel Queipo Ruiz

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Miguel García, Holguín, 10 January 2025 — The obsolete weapons stored in the military warehouse that exploded on January 7 in Melones, in the municipality of Rafael Freyre in Holguín, are still in the “process of explosions” and the experts have not yet been able to reach the site. Three days after the first detonation and with 13 people missing – most of them military service conscripts – the despair of the families is increasing.

“There are several mothers with nervous breakdowns because they are only told to be calm, but they do not make any progress in the search,” a relative of the family of one of the young soldiers told 14ymedio. “The mother of one of the boys from the military service who is missing is my friend and she is devastated. Yesterday she tried to go out on her own to the military base to look for her son and we had to stop her, but the lack of response is enormous, they only tell us that we have to wait.”

According to the head of the Communist Party in the province and member of the Central Committee, Joel Queipo Ruiz, the security forces have authorized the return of some displaced persons to houses “located at a radius distance that no longer poses any danger.” As for the “specialized actions, they continue to be carried out within the limits of a certain radius outward from the center of the place.”

Queipo, who referred to the warehouse as a “wrecked facility,” did not give a date for the search of the missing people, he said he is in contact with their relatives. The area is still dangerous for the “physical safety of any human action,” he said. “As soon as conditions permit, the site will be accessed with all the established protective measures.”

“We are also afraid,” adds the source interviewed by 14ymedio, “because we have been told that we cannot talk about this with anyone or post anything on social media because enemies are taking advantage of what has happened to harm the country. I have my WhatsApp full of messages from our relatives who live in other parts of Holguín and I am afraid to answer them because I don’t know if something will happen to me.”

According to the source, “the officers’ families are handling this differently because many of them are very involved people, people from the government, and they know that their husband or son had chosen a job that involves risks. But the conscripts’s parents do not have that strength because they were not there because they wanted to be, they were forced. My friend’s son sometimes said that they were forced to move ammunition, but he talked about it as if everything was under control as if there was no danger.

Several accounts of failed attempts to approach the area have circulated in the official press

“I haven’t said anything to him, but I already have set up a little altar in my house with his picture and a candle. It’s not because I think he’s dead, but if he’s alive he’s also going to need that to get out of there.” She says there are two nerve-wracking issues: “not knowing if he is alive or dead and thinking, about what he could have suffered if he died and if perhaps he was trapped and it was something very painful and long.”

The official press has circulated several stories of failed attempts to approach the area. One of them, published in the State newspaper Granma, was about the president of the Municipal Assembly of People’s Power of Rafael Freyre, Alexis Driggs Gómez. The leader, according to the newspaper, “bears on his forehead, between his eyes, the mark of the impact of a shard of glass from the first big explosion that occurred in the Military Unit.”

Driggs was in the area with a group of military personnel at 2 a.m. when the shock wave from one of the detonations threw them to the ground, “amid a cloud of particles, dirt and dust flying in all directions.”

Authorities have not said much about the details of the accident itself, although it is estimated that there have been at least two separate explosions on the first day, and many more in the following days. Without information on how much military material was stored at Melones it is impossible to get an accurate idea of how much more ammunition will blow up in the area.

Translated by LAR

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