The former Cuban lieutenant colonel Raúl Risco Pérez revealed in an interview with Tania Costa on CiberCuba the cultural clash experienced by the officers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) when they were forcibly transferred to the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) following the purge triggered by the Causa Número 1 of 1989, which concluded with the execution of General Arnaldo Ochoa.
The MININT officials greeted the newcomers with hostility and sarcasm: "When we arrived at the Ministry of the Interior, some said we were invaders; others, well, they gave us a nickname that relates to something very personal that women use: they called us 'intimate' because we had arrived at a good place, at a bad time."
"Concho Risco, it's just that the intimate is going to a good place but at a bad time, and that's what has happened to you. You have come at a terrible moment for the Ministry of the Interior," Captain Leyva reportedly told him.
In the beginning, Raúl Luis Risco Pérez, former lieutenant colonel of the FAR and the MININT, lawyer, former political prisoner, and Cuban opposition member residing in Tampa, attempted to resist that transfer unsuccessfully.
"I wanted to continue in aviation and jump parachutes," Risco Pérez explained, but General Martínez Puente made it clear that there was no room for negotiation: "It's an order from the minister, and the order must be followed. You have to go to the Ministry of the Interior."
Thus, he and other officials from different branches of the FAR were incorporated into the MININT during a restructuring process that followed the 1989 purge, when the military leadership loyal to Raúl Castro took control of that institution after the dismissal and subsequent conviction of Minister José Abrantes.
The contrast between both groups was immediate and striking. According to Risco Pérez, "the Ministry of the Interior had a much higher standard of living. They considered themselves far superior to the officers of the Armed Forces, and they truly were."
The material difference was profound: "Hundreds of sergeants from the Ministry of the Interior, for example, had cars, they had vehicles, they had nice houses; however, we had none."
In the FAR, the situation was radically different. "We had the colonel in the FAR, and many times a few other colonels also had that Russian chief assigned to them because they were the heads of a battalion or a regiment; they didn’t have private cars, and we generally lived in the microbrigade buildings which had leaks everywhere," he recalled.
That gap created tension from the very beginning.
Risco Pérez is a co-founder of the Cuban Movement of Military Conscientious Objectors, established in February 2021 along with retired brigadier general Rafael del Pino and other former officers, which calls on active military personnel not to suppress the Cuban population.
In the interview with Tania Costa, she explains how she fell from grace for drafting a report opposing Fidel Castro's idea to increase the sentences for theft and livestock sacrifice from a maximum of 5 years to 20 years.
His testimony adds to that of other ex-military personnel who closely experienced the purge of 1989, such as Máximo Omar Ruiz Matoses, another former lieutenant colonel of the FAR and MININT who was sentenced to 29 years in prison—reduced to 20—after calling for the resignation of Fidel and Raúl Castro during a high command meeting in 1990.
In an interview with NTN24 in May of this year, Risco Pérez urged Cuban soldiers not to sacrifice their lives for what he described as an unjust cause and argued that the military should disobey orders for repression.
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