Dayan Torres Leyva is desperate. Her husband, Adrián Suárez Fernández, is one of the nine missing rafters off the coast of Santa Cruz del Nortein the province of Mayabeque, on June 22.
The authorities have not informed him of this. The young woman, 22 years old and a month and a half old, tells 14ymedio that he found out from the relatives of the six survivors, all of them from the town of Pedro Pi, Mayabeque, who, he says, are detained.
Two of them, Torres Leyva details, were arrested on the same beach; the other four were able to return to their homes, where the police went to look for them.
Later, he saw the note in the official press, which he reproduced a statement from the Ministry of the Interior on Monday, June 27, with an unlikely account of the events.
It is not explained how these six men were able to return to land if the boat sank “a considerable distance from the coast”
“In the early hours of June 22, members of the National Revolutionary Police detected a citizen on the coast, near the thermoelectric plant in Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque, with sunburn and symptoms of dehydration,” said that report, which claimed that the person was part of “a group of 15 men who had jumped into the sea” in the Jibacoa area on the night of June 20 with the aim of leaving the country and that, the next day, the boat ” had sunk a considerable distance from the coast”.
It is not explained how these six men were able to return to land if the boat sank “a considerable distance from the coast”.
The last time Torres heard from her husband was in the early hours of June 21, when she told him that they were about to leave. “He has not been heard from until today.”
As much as he has asked about the boat, he says, they have not given him any information, or any detail that could be used to recognize it in photographs. “What those who came out say is that she sank,” she explains. “What we relatives don’t understand is how it can be possible that neither boat nor bodies are found… So this news comes out of the nine Cuban rafters in the Bahamas, which can not be such a coincidence. We don’t know if they are telling the truth or something else happened.”
Regarding the disappeared, she provides the names of six of them, in addition to her husband: Osvaldo Javier Domínguez, Diosnel Pérez, Reiber, Carlos Alberto del Valle and Freddy Idalberto Pécora.
“I never agreed with his departure, but he always told me: Dayan, I want a better future for my daughter, I’m not going to have it here”
Torres Leyva regrets that the information has not been provided directly to the relatives: “In a publication by Cubadebate, that seemed disrespectful to me, because in the end we are family and the things they say hurt us, they wrote that they are waiting for the bodies to float to see if they appear”.
The 15 boys, all boys, who were on the boat were from the same area of Mayabeque. “Most of the 15 have children and no longer know how to get ahead,” says Torres Leyva.
The reasons for her husband, Adrián Suárez Fernández, 28, to migrate are the same. “I never agreed with him leaving, but he always told me: Dayan, I want a better future for my daughter, I’m not going to have it here.”
The young woman indicates that Adrián, who had not worked for two months due to an appendicitis operation, has this scar on his abdomen by which he can be recognized. Although the statement from the Ministry of the Interior assured that “the search actions continue, as well as the investigations by the competent authorities for the total clarification of this painful fact”, Torres Leyva says that they have suspended the search in Santa Cruz del Norte.
She has one hope left: that her husband may be among those Cuban rafters who, according to what she has read online, were intercepted in the Bahamas.
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