According to the workers and neighbors of the necropolis, looters and “fugitives” take refuge among the graves
14ymedio, Havana, 20 September 2024 — “Cruel, gloomy, inexcusable.” With three adjectives, the official press summarizes this Friday the panorama of the Vicente García de Las Tunas cemetery, which has become, according to its own caregivers, a no man’s land. The necropolis is not only haunted by the typical cases of looted graves and drifting bones, but also, after five in the afternoon, when the workers leave and the darkness lends itself to misdeeds and hiding places for “fugitives,” not even the police dare to enter.
The unusual chronicle of Periódico 26 provides not only descriptions of the cemetery but also stories that could be part of a thriller. The protagonist of the article, Daysi Aguilera Santiesteban, a woman from Las Tunas who sought to move* the remains of her relatives to the Jobabo cemetery, tells the newspaper that after exhuming two brothers and their father – in a process already painful for the families – the plastic boxes where they were deposited disappeared.
Upon returning to the cemetery, the woman found the remains of the three men – all soldiers who went to Angola or participated in some campaign of the regime – scattered on the ground. There was no sign, in the pantheon of fighters where she had left them, of the funeral boxes.
“A head on one side and a bone on the other,” is how the remains spent the whole month of August, says the newspaper, “in God’s hands,” while Daysi knocked on the doors of the police, the technicians, the Prosecutor’s Office, the municipal government and even the Party. The answer was always the same: “mistreatment” and “little sensitivity,” says Periódico 26. Only at the end of August was the woman finally able to transport the remains of her relatives.
“After 5:00 pm, this place has no security, and we are located in a very complex neighborhood”
One could think that what happened to Daisi Aguilera is excessive bad luck or an isolated case, but the confessions of the employees of the necropolis themselves – who have given up secrecy in the face of the situation – say that it is not. “After 5:00 pm, this place has no security, and we are located in a very complex neighborhood, constantly attended to by the structures of the Government and the Party,” is the first thing that Jorge Gordales Reyes, manager of Vicente García since the beginning of this year, tells Periódico 26.
The manager assures that, until recently, “many people lived in the cemetery.” He says there were “more than five workers” who have had to be separated from their positions, some “with more than 15 years of work,” for “violations and crimes.” “I can assure you that this place has not been like that for a long time. You can walk through it and not see any debris; it is clean, and we are very severe with indiscipline,” he says, although his own workers deny some of his statements.
Not only are most of the
