MIAMI, United States. — The mother of Héctor Adrián Batista Zayas, one of the recruits who disappeared following the January 7 explosions in an arms and ammunition warehouse in the municipality of Rafael Freyre, in Holguín, is “destroyed,” according to a report of Cuban Diary which cites sources close to the family.
Batista Zayas, 20 years old, lived in the La Pedrona neighborhood (Mayari municipality) and, according to his neighbors, he was an “only child.”
“The mother is devastated, she almost died with the news and she even had to be admitted to therapy. She is already home, but she is not well, she is like gone, she does not react to anything, like she is out of this world, crying almost all the time,” he told Cuban Diary a close family friend identified as Alejandro.
Another neighbor described the recruit as “almost a child,” and regretted that his body has not yet been located: “It is not easy to hand over your son to the State for Military Service and be told that he just disappeared. There is no body to protect him, they say they have not been able to get into those tunnels.”
Five days after the detonations, the authorities maintain the restricted area, which makes it impossible to confirm whether the missing people could still be alive.
Last Friday, the Ministry of the Armed Forces (MINFAR) reported that the hundreds of people evacuated after the explosions at the Protective Work of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, in the town of Melones, had returned to their homes.
The organization also specified that “as soon as conditions allow, the place will be accessed with all the established protection measures” and assured that it maintained contact with the relatives of “the disappeared”, about whom it did not offer any new information.
From the MINFAR note it is inferred that rescue efforts had not yet begun some four days after the disaster.
On the same day of the incident, January 7, MINFAR reported that 13 people were missing. The information was limited to a list with the names of the missing (two with the rank of major, two second non-commissioned officers; and nine identified as “soldiers” who were serving the Military service).
The brief note at that time only added that his relatives had been informed and investigative actions at the scene of the incident continued. Since then, the competent authorities have barely offered information on how the search efforts are progressing.
“They have not searched at any time. They told the relatives that they could not do it because they could cause more explosions and they could not risk more lives, and they had to wait 72 hours,” he told this Thursday. CubaNet Jesús Antonio, uncle of recruit Liander José García Oliva, 19 years old.
“Yesterday [miércoles 8 de enero] They went to the parents’ house and reported that there was no chance of life, that if anyone was alive they would have already tried to leave. It hurts me because they were left for dead without looking for them.”
Although there has been no official communication in this regard, other relatives and friends confirmed to this medium that the authorities denied that they could still be alive, and that they are not even trying to recover the bodies. The temperature inside the warehouses and the possibility of new explosions would be the reason that slows down the rescue efforts.
Last Thursday, the official newspaper Granma published an article to highlight the evacuation work carried out and the courage of soldiers and officials in being close to explosive zones. In the article they omitted whether they had attempted rescue tasks, and what the experts believed about the condition of the missing people.
