Massacre at Sea: The Cuban Regime Murdered Children, and American Activists Still Defend It

Today is the 32nd anniversary of the 13 de Marzo tugboat massacre, the night the Cuban regime rammed and sank a civilian tugboat carrying families who had chosen terror at sea over terror on land. Forty-one people died, including ten children. That is not history at a distance. It is a wound with names, ages, and children pulled under the water while their parents fought to keep them alive.

I was born in Cuba, condemned from my first breath to live under the boot of communism.

The regime’s agents repeatedly summoned and interrogated my parents at home and at work, and even seven-year-old me did not escape their scrutiny. They turned neighbors into informants, families into suspects, and ordinary conversations into sources of fear. Hunger followed us everywhere. We survived on meager rations while the Communist elite lived high above the misery they had created. It is the same today.

We lacked food, medicine, freedom, and hope. I remember the fear in my grandmother’s eyes whenever the authorities came to our door, especially after my father was sent to a labor camp. The dictatorship did not merely control our lives. It invaded our homes, stripped away our dignity, tried to crush our spirits, and put my parents in jail.

But we were among the lucky ones. We eventually escaped with nothing but our lives, and that was all we needed once we got to America.

Others were not as fortunate.

At about 3:00 a.m. on July 13, 1994, seventy-two Cubans boarded the aging tugboat named 13 de Marzo and left Havana Harbor. Parents carried children. Husbands stood beside wives. Entire families placed their lives in the hands of the sea because they could no longer endure life under Castro’s rule.

They wanted no conquest. They sought no power. They wanted only freedom.

The regime answered that longing with violence.

As the tugboat moved farther from shore, government vessels pursued it into open water. Survivors testified that water cannons came first, blasting the deck with such force that parents had to hold children tightly to keep them from being thrown overboard. They begged the attackers to stop. The attackers did not stop.

Then came the ramming.

According to survivor testimony, a second tugboat struck from behind and broke part of the vessel apart. The boat began to sink under the weight of the passengers below deck and the force of the assault above them. People trapped inside slammed against walls and ceilings as water flooded in. Mothers called for help. Children screamed. The sea took what the regime left behind.

At about 4:50 a.m., the 13 de Marzo disappeared beneath the water.

Forty-one people died. Ten of them were children. Only thirty-one survived.

The murdered children were Hellen Martínez Enríquez (five or six months old), Ángel René Abreu Ruiz (three years old), José Carlos Nicle Anaya (three years old), Xicdy Rodríguez Fernández (two years old), Giselle Borges Álvarez (four years old), Caridad Leyva Tacoronte (four or five years old), Yasser Perodín Almanza (eleven years old), Yausel Eugenio Pérez Tacoronte (eleven years old), Juan Mario Gutiérrez García (ten years old), and Eliécer Suárez Plasencia (approximately twelve years old).

Their crime was not violence. Their crime was not treason.

Their crime, in the eyes of the Castro regime, was trying to leave.

María Victoria García lost her husband and her ten-year-old son, Juan Mario. She held her son on floating debris for nearly thirty minutes, fighting the waves, trying to keep him above water until he slipped from her grasp. That is the kind of grief only a murderous regime can create: intimate, helpless, and indelible.

Other survivors described mothers kneeling on the deck and begging the attackers to stop. The water cannons kept firing. Arquímedes Lebrigio testified that the tugboat remained sound until the deliberate ramming began.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights later concluded that the Cuban state bore responsibility for the deaths and violated the victims’ rights to life, personal integrity, movement, and justice. It called for an investigation, punishment of those responsible, compensation for the families, and recovery of the bodies and wreckage. The regime did none of it.

Instead, Fidel Castro defended the actions of those involved. Raúl Castro repeated the government’s claim that the sinking resulted from an accident. The dictatorship protected the perpetrators, maligned the dead, and denied grieving families even the dignity of recovering their loved ones.

This was not a maritime accident.

It was an atrocity committed by a government that considered human beings the property of the state.

And still, on this anniversary, I am forced to watch Americans defend the regime that did it.

CodePink stands near the front of that shameful procession. It brands itself a feminist peace organization devoted to “life-affirming programs,” but on Cuba it acts like a shield for repression. It condemns U.S. pressure while refusing to center the dictatorship’s political prisoners, censorship, and violence. Its “stand with Cuba” language is meaningless unless it includes the victims of the regime, not the regime’s public relations.

Hasan Piker belongs in the same moral fog. He has made a career out of treating provocation as wisdom and hostility toward America as a sign of seriousness. Saying “America deserved 9/11” and telling viewers that Republicans who cared about Medicare or Medicaid fraud “would kill Rick Scott” is not daring commentary. It is ugly, reckless incitement.

The pattern is the same: outrage for America, indulgence for its enemies. They wrap themselves in compassion, but compassion that refuses to confront a dictatorship’s victims becomes propaganda.

The dead of the 13 de Marzo deserved better than this. So do the Cubans still living under the boot of a regime that answered escape with drowning children.

I cannot comprehend how anyone can look upon the graves, the prison cells, the shattered families, the endless exile, and the bodies of children lying beneath the sea, then still summon one word of excuse for the regime that put them there. To defend that dictatorship is to turn away from the dead, spit on the suffering of the living, and make peace with evil.

There is no honorable middle ground. There is only the side of the victims and the side of their killers. Piker, Code Pink and all of their ilk continue to stand on the side of killers.