“When Covid started and the numbers of the deaths began to hit hard, in the reports they told you certain numbers, but if you went to see yourself you saw the reality was different. Why am I saying this? I am basically going to tell you something that I personally experienced. Look, the furniture company where I used to work back then was making coffins made of pine, because they didn’t have any supply. And it was our responsibility to make the coffins that were used in Guantánamo at that time. And in Guantánamo, in this company where I worked, we were able to make 800 coffins in one night. From six in the morning to six in the evening. But they were gone too soon. There were so many.”
“It was the so-called punishment unit. Because first of all, nobody wanted to go there, since those places are... Imagine that the closest town to my unit was 12 kilometers away. The nearest town was 12 kilometers away. I had to cross the river three times. At that time, we slept on wadding mattresses there as if we were prisoners lying side by side in a contingent under a roof made of fiber. We ate from metal trays, and they woke you up at five, six in the morning. We would go harvest coffee all wet, climbing up the hill with little food in our stomachs. That was creating stuff... Us, the young people, we didn't want to be there.”
“October 24, 2012. Full military service. From the station 33, which was the sniper post, I saw an anti-personnel mine blow up more than... the part where we were, was an exit path which was usually one of the last stations... there were more than nine people or so. Something like that. From those nine people we were only capable of saving three of them. The rest died in the attempt. I saw three of them, including a minor, being blown up by a mine (...) And there I realized, that from those nine people, we can only save three. The other ones were blown up. The things that happen in those fields... when one mine explodes, it’s followed by a series of other ones. The first one that exploded hit a young girl. In front of her there was a boy using the usual technique... with a meter long stick and a magnet attached to the end that’s close to the ground so when you get close to the mine the gravity stops you. This sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sadly, for them it didn’t (...) It is a sad, painful thing to see people trying to escape from their own country risking their lives. They’re willing to put their lives in risk trying to find something better.”
Jesús Ali Ortiz Mayor was born on July 10, 1990 in the city of Guantánamo. He grew up with his family in the neighborhood called El Caribe in poor conditions. Despite being aware of the money situation, he describes his elementary school as a happy period of life. Things dramatically changed when he started high school. As a consequence of his friendships from the neighborhood, he got to know the less pleasant aspects of life. The environment he lived in at that time was full of violence and drugs. Even though from time to time he would participate in the fights between the neighborhood kids, he maintained his good grades and wanted to apply to the institute of technology. Unfortunately, his mother fell ill from a serious illness and at one point she even had to undergo a surgery. At the same time his father left the family and Jesús had to become the man of the house. He found a job to help out his mother and after her operation he stayed home for almost two years taking care of her. He later entered military service in the Brigada de la Frontera unit, which is in charge of controlling the area around the US base at Guantanamo. He had to watch several attempts of emigration with his own eyes, people who tried to escape through minefield and died after the explosions. Due to problems with an officer in the army, he was sent to a punishment unit far from civilization. There he spent more than a year and a half working in agriculture in poor conditions. After finishing his military service, he joined the civil life again and for a while he worked in a town called Caimanera. He later returned to Guantánamo, where he worked as a warehouse manager for a furniture manufacturing company. It was there where he found out that during the coronavirus pandemic, the official numbers provided by the Cuban government had nothing to do with the reality. He realized that when he saw that even though in the company they produced enormous quantities of coffins, it wasn’t enough.
