John Suarez in Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter:

Remembering some of the victims of Cuban communism: Three young black men executed by firing squad in 2003

“Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” – Mishnah (1135-1204)

Some psychologists argue that as the number of victims increase into the hundreds, and thousands that compassion collapses out of the human fear of being overwhelmed. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin put it more succinctly: “When one man dies it’s a tragedy. When thousands die it’s statistics.” In the case of Cuba the communist regime has killed tens of thousands, and many have become numb in the face of this horror. Therefore on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first communist regime in Russia, that caused so much harm around the world, will focus on an infinitesimal sampling of some of the victims of Cuban communism.

The eleventh entry remembers three young black men executed by firing squad in 2003 for having hijacked a ferry in an effort to reach the United States.

Previous entries in this series were about Cubans trying to change the system nonviolently, Cubans who tried to leave the island, a student shot to death for walking down the wrong sidewalk in Havana, and thetenth entry was a young Ethiopian woman murdered in a red terror in her homeland for unknown reasons in 1978.

Three men, Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac, were among a group who hijacked a Cuban ferry with passengers on board on April 2, 2003 and tried to force it to the United States. The incident ended without bloodshed, after a standoff with Cuban security forces. They were executed nine days later, following a summary trial, by firing squad.

Eleven individuals attempted to hijack the small ferry “Baraguá” that covered a route between Havana and the neighboring town of Casablanca with the goal of arriving in the United States, but it ran out of gas. Officials were able to retake the vessel without loss of life or injury to the fifty passengers on board. Within a week the three men were condemned to death for committing “acts of terrorism” in a summary trial that lasted less than a day.

They did not have a political agenda. Their only goal was fleeing Cuba to the United States. Questions were raised at the time that if they had been white and not black they would not have been executed.