Testimony of a surviving Cuban fighter who defended President Maduro
From Ignacio Ramonet.
Yohandris Varona Torres was two months and six days a member of the Personal Security in Venezuela when the attack occurred, the most intense experience in 23 years of military service, on his first internationalist mission. But that Saturday, January 3rd turned fatal.
At 12 o’clock at night he got in his position, he had six hours of duty. And even though everything seemed calm Yohandri knew that the greatest danger was in trusting. That’s why he was doing guard duty with great zeal. It was about two in the morning when he saw the first of the helicopters of the US command group that would land in Caracas that early morning to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro. He barely had time to get out of his guard duty post to a parapet a few meters away and start firing. You owe your life to that decision, or to luck. As if they were guided by a plane of millimeter accuracy, the attackers directed their fire against the box that he had occupied only a few seconds earlier.
“They had much more firepower than we, says Yohandri, who only had light arms. The other thing in their favor is that they seemed to know where everything was. So they threw him into the posts and the bedrooms where we the Cubans were and managed to kill, among the first, the bosses.”
About 23 years of experience in the Directorate of Personal Security, he had never lived anything similar. But in training he had been taught well and that early morning he emptied magazine after magazine shooting at the enemies. ‘I had to pull and throw. Defend and kill,” he sentenced. “We hit the planes that were shooting at us. Even though our armament was smaller we didn’t stop fighting, we confronted. I have my preparation and I know how to fight, but they were superior to us. At the time my only thought was to battle. I had to shoot and I started doing it. ” “Despite their fire advantage, he added, I’m sure we made casualties.” More than they recognize. We hit it hard. “We kept pulling until almost all of us fell, dead or injured.” It wasn’t a quick fight, or easy, as initially Trump and his minions wanted others to believe. Over the days it has been confirmed that only death and the lack of ammunition managed to extinguish the Cuban resistance.
Yohandry remembers everything with terrible clarity. His eyes seem to go through the images one by one. Cry. He is crying in rage. He can never forget the confrontation, he says, but especially in the following hours, in which the group’s survivors had to move the bodies of their fallen compatriots. “We loaded them up and took them to a building that had suffered damage but allowed us to treat them. It was very hard, because they were men we knew, with whom we had lived until a few hours earlier. But we carried them all, we left no one behind. “When the bombs start falling all you think about is fighting.” We were there for it and that’s what we did.
All I’m left is the pain that we couldn’t stop them. And this pain, says as the chest is pounding, I have to take it off with the enemy.”