While the young man awaits trial, the officer who shot him remains free.
PINAR DEL RÍO, Cuba.- On September 20 of last year, Deiby Díaz-Pimienta Domínguez was wounded by a gunshot at the hands of an officer from Military Unit 4600, located in El Ocho de La Coloma, in Pinar del Río, where the young man was serving his Compulsory Military Service (SMO). However, today he is detained awaiting trial, while his attacker remains free.
The events, according to the story of Yarenni Domínguez Caldevilla, mother of the 19-year-old young man, occurred in the early morning of that day, after a fight between Deiby and Lieutenant Ernesto.
“My son was leaving his guard at 4:45 am in search of his relief, a soldier named Leandro Sergio, who today is imprisoned in El Globo. When Deiby asked the barracksman of the second company about Leandro Sergio, he told him that he had not seen him and then he went up to the third company to look for him,” he told CubaNet.
“Ernesto was lying down at that moment and when he heard Deiby talking to the guard and going up, he stood up. When Deiby got there and saw him, they began to argue. In the afternoon they had already had a few words,” he added.
“It is a lie that Deiby kicked that lying officer. That they want to modify things in their own way is different. There was no one there, only the two of them, it is their word against the other’s,” he continued.
According to the description of the event made by Domínguez Caldevilla, after the argument, Lieutenant Ernesto began to “slap Deiby in the face” and he punched him “in the ribs” and knocked him to the ground. The officer then grabbed Deiby by the feet and also threw him to the ground.
In the middle of the fight, the barracks man from the second company arrived, supposedly, according to Yarenni, to separate the soldiers. However, he attacked Deiby from behind. At that moment, recruit Leandro Sergio arrived and hit the guard who was hitting the young man from Pinar del Río; Finally the officers arrived and stopped the fight, sending each one to his company.
“Ernesto goes down to the officer on duty and asks him for the key to the weapons room. He went up, took an AKM, removed the blanks and went down with that loaded weapon in search of my son. He raked the weapon on the stairs and called Deiby. That is called attempted murder with premeditation, according to the laws of this country,” he explained.
Yarenni continues to relate that when he saw that Deiby did not come out, Lieutenant Ernesto entered the company where the soldiers were sleeping, with a loaded gun and pointing it at them. “Deiby didn’t tell me that, the same soldiers he targeted told me that,” he said.
“When they take him out of the company with that loaded weapon, Deiby goes out to see what happened and the moment he goes out to the lobby (Lieutenant Ernesto) shoots him in the thigh of his right leg, from a meter away,” he said.
The medical care odyssey
After being shot, Deiby was taken to the medical post on foot, even though he was quite far from the company: “a considerable distance,” Yarenni explained. There was no doctor on duty in the place, only a nurse and a “sanitary man,” which is nothing more than a soldier placed in the medical post.
“The nurse didn’t know what to do, he was in a tremendous state of nerves, imagine a soldier with a gunshot wound and draining blood. They didn’t even make a tourniquet for him,” he commented.
Deiby was taken to the Abel Santamaría General Hospital, lying on the floor of an ambulance, with a vein channeled with a needle and two soldiers grabbing the door of the vehicle. He spent two days in that health institution, until September 22, when he was transferred to the Military Hospital, where he remained admitted for almost two months.
“While I was admitted, Major Ortega from the military region came to me and told me: ‘ah, because you are the mother of the handsome man, you are the mother of the one who punches him, he was right to shoot him and be glad that he left him alive because I would have killed him.’
Díaz-Pimienta spent two more months at his home, located in Las Martinas, in the Pinar del Río municipality of Sandino, recovering from the injury. According to his mother, the orthopedic doctor who received him at the first hospital told him that “he was not born on July 30 but on September 20,” because the bullet passed one millimeter from his femoral artery, so he could have bled to death.
Deception: from the house to the dungeon
Last Monday, January 19, Colonel Yordanky, Deiby’s brigade chief, called his mother to inform her that the young man had to join the Military Hospital that Wednesday.
“In this country the current is terrible, there is none, the coverage is zero. I have a younger child, 12 years old, coincidentally that day he had a test and he was giving him a fever with this bad virus, even I didn’t have any money because because of all this I am not working. And I couldn’t take Deiby to the hospital,” Yarenni said.
“On Thursday he called me and I explained the reasons, and on Friday at a quarter to 12, the prosecutor Jorge, who is in charge of the case, called me to inform me that there was a car that was going to pick him up and that it was already going through Manuel Lazo, eight kilometers from Las Martinas,” he added.
According to the prosecutor’s explanation, Deiby could not continue in the house because he is passing the SMO, and since he cannot join the military unit where he was, they had to place him in the Military Hospital.
“He even told me not to resist, not to be spoiled, to behave well, because otherwise they were going to have to send him to Prevention and he would go straight to a cell. And where is my son today?” Yarenni questioned.
As soon as Deiby arrived at the Military Hospital, they put handcuffs on him and took him into custody to the military Prevention unit, located at the Entronque de Ova.
“No one could give me reasons or a reason for where my son was. I tried to locate the prosecutor and he never picked up the phone. Without power and with a small boy, I spent the entire night in the middle of a meadow, on top of a hill looking for coverage to call the people of the military region and no one gave me reasons. They didn’t care about a mother’s pain, the worry, the desperation,” she complained.
“Why the deception? Why the lie? The only message I received from the prosecutor was: ‘I can’t treat her, I’m in the hospital with a personal problem’. And what is mine? Does that child not have a mother, does he not have a family? Don’t they care about my suffering?”, he lamented.
Yarenni was able to see her son for the first time on Monday, January 26, just 10 minutes. This Tuesday he was going to be transferred to the El Globo military prison, located in Havana, but since there was no capacity, they returned him to Prevention, in Pinar del Río.
“And the officer who shot him, whose duty is to care for, protect, teach and discipline the young people who are complying with the SMO, is loose in the military region working, going home as if he had not committed a crime. I know that my son should not have hit him, but the law must be the same for everyone,” he stated.
The call
Due to her experience with Deiby, Yarenni wonders how far the SMO will go, where many recruits have taken their lives or died due to alleged accidents.
“They are stubborn because they treat them like dogs in the military units, they lack respect, which I have witnessed, no one tells me,” said Domínguez Caldevilla.
Likewise, she called on all mothers who, like her, have children of Military Service age; to which They have gone through the pain of losing them. because they have made attempts on their lives for not withstanding the pressure, and those whose children have suffered “accidents” while fulfilling that “citizen duty” established by law.
“I thank God that my son is alive, but four months ago I could have buried him. The only thing that worries them is that I keep quiet, but I got tired of obeying. Think mothers, so that tomorrow you don’t have to live the pain that I am experiencing today,” Yarenni finally expressed.
Deiby is accused of disobedience and violence against the boss. According to the young man’s lawyer, the trial, which must take place in a military court in Pinar del Río, could take months.
Yarenni, for his part, was informed that he could not file a complaint, since that was done by the military unit by trade. The attacking officer is supposedly already accused, but he is free, working in the military region and sleeping at home.
According to a report from the independent news outlet Inverted Treethe Facebook page ‘No more victims in military service in Cuba’ has made public cases of abuses and deaths of young people while completing Military Service. Precisely, they documented at least 50 deaths between 2020 and 2025.
