Milagros García is the mother of the young Adrián Rodríguez García, who passed away at the age of 19 on December 31, 2023 after being struck by an unlicensed and intoxicated motorist, who fled the scene instead of helping him while he was still alive.
She has a broken heart after learning on this Friday, January 17, 2025, the sentence that condemns Robeisy Pedrozo Gómez, the man who killed her son, to only five years and eight months in prison (the prosecution requested 9 years, and the defense asked for 3). The court that delivered this sentence was composed of Yeline de la Caridad Embaló Quijano, Yaimy Cabrera Sánchez (rapporteur), and Odalys Cos Pérez.
"My son is dead. Where is the justice of Cuba?" This mother, completely outraged, asks as she sees that other crimes, such as animal sacrifice or politically motivated offenses, carry harsher penalties than the violent death of her 19-year-old son.
"They won't return him to me, but at least he deserved a fair trial, a trial with dignity. That wretched murderer should pay for what he did, even though my child won't come back; only then can he rest in peace. With the loss of my son, my life was taken away from me, and with that trial, they have just buried me," she said.
"How could that be? My son was serving (in the military) due to the negligence of the military unit," says the mother, who was visiting Adrián Rodríguez on the very same December 31 when he passed away. She had hoped that by that date he would be home with the family, but her son told her that they were going to discharge him from service a few days after the New Year, even though he had already completed his mandatory time.
Three hours after that visit, Milagros Garcia received a call from the military unit to inform her that her son had passed away. At first, they said that since it was December 31, he had been granted permission to leave, and when she questioned why they allowed him to go, they then claimed that the boy had escaped on a bicycle. It was during that alleged escape that he was hit and ultimately died at a nearby polyclinic, where he was taken by a couple who stopped their car to help as soon as they saw what happened.
"What hurts the most is not that he was killed, because anyone can have an accident. The worst part is that he didn't receive first aid; they left him lying there and the child was still alive. He wet and soiled himself. He was squeezing the hand of the woman who picked him up, trying to talk. He couldn't speak because the blow was to his head," the mother recalls in statements to CiberCuba. She suspects that her son didn't escape the unit but went to run an errand for the military commanders who abused him to the point that they sat on him right after his surgery to force him to do push-ups.
Milagros García is also upset that the document presented at the trial stated that her son was taken to a military hospital, which is not true because the child died at the Marta Abreu polyclinic in Santa Clara. "A child full of life, good, with dreams, with goals, with a future," laments his mother.
Now she is calling for a change in the laws because the current ones, in her opinion, are "very poorly crafted." What happened in her case, she insists, "is not fair." "Those who have not lost a child do not know what that is. They do not know what it means to suffer, to have a broken heart. It's being here, dead, with the heart up there."
That is why she asks judges and prosecutors, as well as the leaders responsible for drafting laws, to take into account that "human life is worth more than anything in this world. Losing a child is like dying while still alive. It is better not to live," she added.
To the mothers of the nine recruits who died in the Holguin explosion, it tells them not to give up, to demand the return of their children's remains. "Demand that they return your children to you, even if they are in pieces."
Filed under:
