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 they would carry out the execution. When it happened, he made a decision that would cost him nearly 20 years in prison.
«In my mind, I couldn't fathom that they would execute the most warrior general of the Armed Forces. But they executed him,» recounts Ruiz Matoses in an interview with Tania Costa, on 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, was the outcome of the Causa No. 1, the most controversial military judicial process of the Castro regime.
Ruiz Matoses knew Ochoa personally. He and his brother were friends with the general, and he had visited him at the Western Army Headquarters in El Calvario shortly before the trial. In that conversation, Ochoa had confessed to him that he didn't want any more wars: "What I want is for them to give me a piece of land to raise my chickens, my little chicks, my piglets, and forget about all the war." By then, 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 the killing, and Escalona, like a lapdog, did everything they told him to," he states, referring to Juan Escalona Reguera, who was then Justice Minister, acting as prosecutor and requesting the death penalty for seven of the fourteen accused.
When the execution was confirmed, Ruiz Matoses immediately called his wife. "Hey, this is over for me," he told her. With 30 years of service, he requested the retirement he was entitled to due to seniority.
The regime's response was not to accept his resignation. From that moment on, he reports, he was subjected to such intense and visible surveillance—a "tremendous visual check"—that even his mother noticed it. "Son, they are going to do you harm," she warned him.
The premonition of his mother turned out to be accurate. Ruiz Matoses was arrested 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 prison term, which 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 of Tania Costa with Ruiz Matoses takes place three days after CiberCuba spoke with Iliana de la Guardia, daughter of Colonel Tony de la Guardia, who was executed along with 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 pertains to that historical moment.
Numerous former military personnel and analysts have maintained for decades that this 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. Today, Ruiz Matoses lives in Spain, but if the transition occurs, he envisions celebrating with a beer in Marianao.
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