Havana native Yoel Cruz Traba assured ‘CubaNet’ that agents of the regime have been harassing him for “years” for his political opinions on social networks.
HAVANA, Cuba. – “I don’t have a job, I’m practically living off charity,” he assured CubaNet Yoel Cruz Traba. The Cuban also denounced that, due to his political opinions and his complaints on social networks about the circumstances in which his brother diedwas expelled from his workplace and has not found work since then.
“I was working in a candy store in Diez de Octubre when my brother died and, following my complaint through a direct [en Facebook] in which I accuse the Cuban Government and the Communist Party of their total responsibility in his death, they called me to tell me that I was a troubled worker and they could not have me there [en la dulcería]”said the man.
Furthermore, Cruz Traba added that agents of the regime have been harassing him for his political opinions on social networks for “years” and that, in the past, they tried to coerce the owners of other private businesses where he worked to fire him.
“I know that I will not be able to work for the Government, but I have been in several places [privados] in which I have lasted little. In others they don’t even hire me… Why can’t I work because I think differently?” asked the interviewee, who also assured that he lives thanks to the charity of friends and his daughter.
Cruz Traba explained that his brother disappeared on the morning of June 3 of this year and that it was not until July 30 that he learned about his death, “thanks to a friendship.”
“I found out about his death through a friend who had relations in the [Hospital] Julio Trigo, who told me to go and ask them to look for him on the list of deceased. It was there where I found out everything,” he said.
However, the interviewee had already been to the same hospital twice to inquire about his brother’s whereabouts and, although he had died since July 4, he had not received any information.
Yoan Cruz, his brother, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. At the time of his disappearance, he had not been able to take his medications for around nine months due to their high cost in the Cuban informal market, where it was only possible to obtain them.
“He took levomepromazine, but I didn’t have the money to buy a medicine that is very expensive and non-existent in pharmacies currently,” he lamented.
Yoan Cruz, as his brother later reconstructed, was transferred to a Homeless Care Center without the family being notified. Shortly after, he died and was buried without any family being aware of it either.
According to Cruz Traba, there were several protocols and procedures that were violated by Public Health and the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) after the disappearance and death of his brother.
“Someone from Forensic Medicine must have taken his fingerprints. If the complaint was already filed, why didn’t they tell me? Oh, to find the ones that suit them they only need a moment,” denounced Cruz Traba.
