Madrid/“I am not a politician, I am not an activist, I am an ice cream seller of Havana, and yet all aspects of my life have been poisoned by Cuban politics and its corrupt regime.” With these words, Osiris Puerto Terry was presented, shot by the Police during the demonstrations of July 11, 2021, in the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and democracy, which took place on Tuesday.
Before the auditorium of the event, in which, between twenty politicians and activists from around the world, Edmundo González Urrutia also participated, considered by much of the international community winning of the presidential ones in Venezuela last July, Puerto Terry began by recounting How, when he was little, his father was forced by the regime to leave in the exodus of the Mariel, after which, his mother, “shattered”, Suicide. “I couldn’t understand it at that age, but my teachers told me that my father was a bad man,” he said. “Later I knew it was a lie, propaganda. My father was not a criminal: he was one of the 125,000 Cubans expelled to the United States in 1980 ”.
He returned home when, a few blocks from his home, he heard a colonel tell a group of six officers: “Fire to all”
Later, as a teenager, when he became the best amateur boxer on the island, the regime, he said, vetoed his entrance to the team due to the “link” with his father. “That is what I mean when I say that Cuban politics ruined my life,” he said. “They destroyed my family, led my mother to suicide and ended my career as a professional in sport. All this before he turned 18. And then, when I was 49, they tried to kill me. ”
He told, thus, how 11J was injured, when, in the middle of the Covid-19 They were under control ”, hundreds of thousands of Cubans took to the streets to demand a change. “To make it clear: I did not participate in the protests,” he said. He had spent the day selling ice cream, the activity to which he dedicated himself, and around 4:30 p.m. he met some friends. They saw the crowd, he says, “but they were peaceful” and chanted slogans like “homeland and life”, “freedom”, “we are not afraid.”
Then, it continues, “the riot brigades appeared and that quickly became a battlefield. Police violently attacked protesters by throwing stones at them and forcing them to retreat. ” He returned home when, a few blocks from his home, he heard a colonel tell a group of six officers: “fire everyone.”
His story, as he told in Geneva, looks like the story of a hunt. An agent shot at his head, “but he failed and gave the wall behind me.” Puerto Terry hid behind a pillar and tried to run to a neighboring building. Then, the police shot for the second time and reached him under the right knee. “I fell to the ground, crying with pain, I tried to get up but I couldn’t. The agent shot me again, reaching my back. ”
“Where is black? We want to make sure it is dead”
Two neighbors dragged him into the building, as seen in one of the videos of the protests disseminated by the organization JUSTICE 11Jbut the agent did not cease in his efforts. “Where is black? We want to make sure he is dead, ”he shouted.
Puerto Terry also narrated how a neighbor of his, doctor, Yoslien Rodríguez Roa, whom he knew from school, held him the bleeding so he could reach the hospital. That doctor, he also recalled, was sentenced to 11 years in jail For the crime of seditionwithout allowing Puerto Terry to testify in their favor at the trial.
At the doors of the center, he continued, the police were waiting for him and tried to hit him again. “Are they going to save that counterrevolutionary?” He says that they asked the doctors, and the head of Guardia replied: “Yes, we are going to save his life, because that is our work.”
As has counted to different mediasince then it did not stop systematic harassment by state security. Despite his wounds, and the bullet that is still housed on his back, he was discharged at 12 days and spent more than a year and a half in bed. His clinic, he denounced, did not have the medications he needed, so he had to resort to his father and his sister, in the United States. “If I had not had my family abroad to help me, I would have died, which is quite ironic, right? The protesters struggled to improve health care and access to medicines, the police shot me and then I was a victim of the same system they protested, ”he said.
“The Balistics Department said they never found projectiles that could relate to the agents who shot me,”
Finally, he detailed his ordeal when trying to obtain compensation from the government, unsuccessfully. “The regime invented all kinds of excuses,” he explained. “The Balistics Department said they never found projectiles that could relate to the agents who shot me and that even if they had shot me, something they supposedly did not have been excused because they were fulfilling their duty, but I know who shot me ”He said. “He was a specialized police captain at 12 meters.”
At least seven other people, he recalled, were shot by the police that week, including the only deadly victim recognized by the regime, DIUBIS LAURENCIO TEJEDAon July 12, in La Güinera, at the hands of Yoennis Pelegrín Hernándezpolice host. “The officer Hernández was never punished for his crime,” adds Puerto Terry, who rises: “I am the living and violent evidence of the repression of the Cuban regime of July 11 and how willing that they were to kill civilians.” Who gave the order “to kill the Disarmed Cuban people,” he stressed, was Díaz-Canel Bermúdez.
Puerto Terry demanded justice for him, the dead and political prisoners who remain tortured in jail, and said goodbye to shouting: “homeland and life”, “Long live Cuba Libre”, “Long live Venezuela Free”, “Long live Nicaragua Libre”, “Below the dictatorship.” Before getting out of the pod, the shirt was opened to show the pulonar that wearing under, black letters in capitalized manuscripts: “homeland and life” and “Diascanel [sic] Singao ”.
