Máximo Omar Ruiz Matoses, former lieutenant colonel of Minint, recalls that he never believed they would execute General Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez. He was sitting in a barbershop when the barber asked him if he thought he would be executed. When it happened, he made a decision that would cost him nearly 20 years in prison.
«In my mind, it was unthinkable that they would execute the most valiant general of the Armed Forces. But they did,» recounts Ruiz Matoses in an interview with Tania Costa, in CiberCuba. The execution of General Ochoa, on July 13, 1989, along with Colonel Antonio «Tony» de la Guardia, Jorge Martínez Valdés, and Amado Padrón Trujillo, marked the conclusion of the Case No. 1, the most controversial military judicial process of the Castro era.
Ruiz Matoses personally knew Ochoa. He and his brother were friends of the general, and he had visited him at the Headquarters of the Western Army in El Calvario shortly before the trial. During that conversation, Ochoa confided in him that he no longer wanted any wars: "What I want is a piece of land to raise my chickens, my chicks, my piglets, and forget all about the war." By that time, he had already been to Ethiopia, Angola, and Nicaragua.
Matoses does not hesitate to point to Fidel Castro as the direct responsible for the execution. "He ordered him to be killed and Escalona, like a lapdog, obeyed everything they told him," he asserts, referring to Juan Escalona Reguera, who was the Minister of Justice at the time and acted as the prosecutor, requesting the death penalty for seven of the fourteen accused.
When the execution was confirmed, Ruiz Matoses called his wife immediately. "Listen, this is over for me," he said to her. With 30 years of service, he requested the retirement he was entitled to due to his seniority.
The regime's response was not to accept his resignation. From that moment on, he claims, he was subjected to such intense and visible surveillance—a tremendous "visual check"—that even his mother noticed. "Son, they are going to hurt you," she warned him.
The premonition of his mother turned out to be accurate. Ruiz Matoses was detained and subjected to a trial without defense guarantees. In fact, his lawyer, Menelao Mora, son of the lawyer Menelao Mora who died during the assault on the Presidential Palace in 1957, was in Santiago when the trial began and Matoses had to accept a court-appointed lawyer, who requested his acquittal. However, he was ultimately sentenced to a term that he served between La Condesa and the special area of the Guanajay prison, the same place where former Interior Minister José Abrantes was held, who died there of a heart attack in January 1991.
The interview with Tania Costa and Ruiz Matoses takes place three days after CiberCuba spoke with Iliana de la Guardia, daughter of Colonel Tony de la Guardia, who was executed alongside FAR General Arnaldo Ochoa. In that interview, De la Guardia mentioned the purge that followed Causes 1 and 2 of 1989 and its consequences for the families of those executed. Ruiz Matoses's conviction relates to that historical moment.
Numerous former military personnel and analysts have argued for decades that that process was a political purge aimed at eliminating individuals with their own power within the military and security apparatus, at a time when the collapse of the Soviet bloc threatened the regime's stability. Ruiz Matoses now lives in Spain, but if the transition occurs, he sees himself celebrating with a beer in Marianao.
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