MIAMI, United States.- The deaths of Cubans in unnatural circumstances have been as painful as they are habitual throughout the more than 60 years that the communist regime in Havana has been in power. Many have lost their lives trying to find opportunities outside and even within Cuba.
Equally tragic is the drowning of a rafter in the Straits of Florida who was trying to reach the United States in search of economic improvement; than the “accidental” death of a young man who passed the Compulsory Military Service and was sent to deal with a fire that evidently exceeded his limited training as a firefighter.
In any of the cases, the blame for the deaths rests with the Government. At the end of the day, every desperate attempt made by Cubans to survive has as its main motive the poverty sponsored by those who run the island.
Such is the case of the young man from Santiago, Rasiel Montero, who was electrocuted on July 29 when he tried to steal a cable from the high-voltage power line. The incident occurred in the cooperative known as Pedro Oliva, in the Songo La Maya municipality, Santiago de Cuba. According to sources consulted by CubaNet, the young man “was doing this to earn money.”
“Rasiel lived in La Mina (neighborhood of Songo La Maya), I knew him well from the street and I know that he stole the tension cables that hold the light poles to sell them to the mattress makers. On one occasion I told him to get out of it because he was too dangerous, but he ignored me. Now nothing can be done, he is already dead, ”said a neighbor of Montero who insisted on not revealing his identity.
The tension cables that support the electricity beams are used to make the springs that make up the core of the mattresses made in private factories. In eastern Cuba this structure is known as a panel. However, the money that mattresses offer for these metals is negligible, and even less when compared to the extremely high cost to life of obtaining them.
According to a self-employed person from this branch, interviewed by our newsroom, each meter of the tensioning cables is paid at 35 Cuban pesos, at least in a large part of Santiago de Cuba. A pole has about 12 meters of this wiring. So, only approximately 420 pesos would be earned for stealing one of these lines.
“It is very painful that a life is lost for so little,” lamented an acquaintance of Rasiel. “His death is another one at the hands of the rulers of this country, due to the misery in which they have sunk the Cuban people. If we lived with dignity no one would risk so much for that nonsense. How little value the life of a Cuban has!”, stressed the woman who preferred to remain anonymous.
The 29-year-old died instantly after his body made contact with the 33 KV power line, which, in theory, should be further away from urban areas. According to testimonies, Montero wanted to take advantage of the scheduled six-hour blackout in La Maya to take over the cable, but the early restoration of service surprised him.
“It’s charred, that’s because it stung badly. It has to bite first up and then down ”, one of the spectators can be heard in the video. His words imply that this practice is quite common in this area.
Rasiel Montero died in the morning hours and was lying on the ground, under the sun, until after four in the afternoon. It was until then that the Police and Legal Medicine arrived at the scene to make the report and lift the body.
Also in July, Girardo Ortega Atencio, from Santiago, was rescued from the rubble of a collapse in what used to be the Vocational Pre-University Institute of Exact Sciences (IPVCE), which had been in disuse for several years. The journalist Iran Suárez shared the news on his Facebook page and assured that this person, along with two others, who were injured: “they were illegally removing steel strips from the structure of one of the ships in the room level,” he wrote.
A nine-meter strip of steel, or rebar as it is well known in Cuba, can cost between 1,000 and 1,500 pesos in the province, an amount of money that is irrelevant given the current cost of living in the country.
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