By Roger Aguilera Morales

The soldiers cried because they loved Ramon; He was a responsible, and nice friend..., but they also cried because they could not raise their rifles and kill the murderers.
 
They had to be calm and patient... the story told by Genaro Rodriguez makes any Cuban patriot crazy, and is a proof of all the annoyance practiced by the Naval Base marines against the heroic youngs of the   Frontier Battalion.

 Ramon Lopez Peña, a humble country man from Puerto Padre, Las Tunas municipality, was one of the 12 children of Eunomia and the fisherman Andres. Only 16 years old, he was selected to fulfill a mission in that first line trench, facing marines that drank run, threw stones, offended with obscene words and pulled the trigger.

It was Sunday, July 19th 1964, during the sunset -says Genaro- when we began our guard. It seemed to be a difficult day, and Ramon, very merrymaker and with a smile on his lips says,”Let’s have a cup of coffee because it might be the last one”. And when we were passing the canteen from one hand to another, a burst sounds between Ramon and the soldier Hector Pupo.

With such situation, the officer on duty orders us  to get down to the trench and take our positions, and during that movement from one place to another, two other bursts sound and someone yelled- they wounded one- I was forward and ask : who ?  and Ramon himself answered: “me, I am wounded”.

I took Ramon and helped him to get down to the trench and he says “ Yankees  sons of the bitch you have killed me “.

Two shots have hit him in the breast and one in the neck. The blood bubbled up and we tried to stop the bleeding, but he died immediately.

We all wanted to fire the assassin hand but the boss on duty, a young whose last name was Corrasana, with tears on his eyes asked us to put our rifles on the ground. The easiest thing in that moment was to shoot, the difficult was not to.

And something similar happened when we arrived at our camp Piedra Blanca. The soldiers cried and walked in front of the dead body to say good bye to Ramon, before he were taken to his funeral in Guantanamo.

Genaro (today director of Las Tunas tvstation) went to the Naval Base for a political mission: to carry on the admission to the Youth Communist Union, and that day in the morning he had interviewed the young guard.

He remembers when Ramon handed over the autobiography, and specially the last line that said “I want to be a communist”. 

Ramon is one of the so many victims of the terrorism against Cuba, since the very beginning of the triumph of the Revolution, but he is also one of the symbols of a people accustomed to be attacked and accused unjustly; and a people that have learned to stand up and fight.