On the night of June 12, 1989, the twin brothers Antonio "Tony" de la Guardia and Patricio de la Guardia received a call from the Ministry of the Interior (MININT): the minister wanted to see them. The pretext was a congratulation — their birthday was the next day. When they arrived, they were waiting to arrest them.
This is how Ileana de la Guardia recounts it, daughter of Colonel Tony de la Guardia, in an interview with Tania Costa, in CiberCuba. "They were arrested on the night of the 12th because they were called to the Ministry of the Interior and simply told that the minister wanted to see them, that they were going to be congratulated," explains the neuropsychologist, who resides in Paris and is the president of Concertación DFRENTE.
The next day, June 13, Ileana de la Guardia and her family were on their way to have lunch at her uncle Patricio's house when they discovered what had happened. "We found that they had thrown all the weapons on the floor and that they were conducting a search in the home of Patricio de la Guardia's wife," she recalls. At the same time, agents of the regime were carrying out another search at her father's home.
Both brothers were taken to Villa Marista, the headquarters of State Security in Havana, where they were held during the process known in history as the Causa Número 1 of 1989.
The fate of the two brothers was radically different. Tony de la Guardia was executed on July 13, 1989, alongside General Arnaldo Ochoa, Jorge Martínez Valdés, and Amado Padrón Trujillo. Patricio de la Guardia, on the other hand, received a 30-year prison sentence. The charge: failing to report his brother to superiors who were aware of what was happening.
Ileana de la Guardia calls that accusation absurd. "Patricio's sentence is 30 years in prison for not reporting his brother for activities that we knew were authorized, so it was all quite absurd," she points out.
For Tony de la Guardia's daughter, the deception of the "congratulation" was not a minor detail, but the first link in a process designed to destroy the image of the accused before eliminating them. "It was a process where, from start to finish, they sought to humiliate them and degrade their image to justify the executions," she stated in previous comments.
The neuropsychologist claims that behind the scandal of drug trafficking —the official pretext for the trial— there was a political motivation: Fidel and Raúl Castro sought to eliminate voices within the Armed Forces and MININT that, inspired by the Soviet Perestroika, advocated for a change of system in Cuba.
Tony de la Guardia was 51 years old when he was executed. His daughter has been demanding justice ever since.
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