Cuba sent young people "without the necessary training" to put out the biggest fire in its history

It was the most voracious fire recorded in the recent history of Cuba and also the largest petrochemical disaster that has been reported on the communist island, but not all the firefighters who were sent to extinguish the flames were trained for such a task.

At least four of the 14 firefighters who disappeared in the gigantic fire at a fuel depot in Matanzas — some 60 miles from Havana —

, according to family members.

The young people, they claim, lacked the training to deal with a fire that required international help and burned at more than 1,000 degrees Celsius, leaving 123 injured, dozens of homes damaged and more than 4,000 displaced.

Cuban authorities said Wednesday that, in the absence of fingerprints, teeth or DNA, they will not be able to determine the identities of 14 groups of bone remains found under the petrified fuel at the Supertanker Base where lightning struck in the early hours of 5 of August.

The fire at the Matanzas Supertanker Base, one of the largest fuel depots in Cuba, took almost a week to put out.

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However, they presume that the bone fragments belong to the 14 firefighters who disappeared in the fire, which burned for almost a week a short distance from Varadero beach, one of Cuba's main tourist destinations.

Island authorities and the state press have been tight-lipped about the identities and ages of those who vanished in the flames.

"You are not a firefighter nor would you be, you were just passing military service, you are a doctor and this is how you would save lives, you are my eternal neurosurgeon. My little boy," the mother of one of the recruits wrote in a viral publication, saying that his son planned to study Medical Sciences.

“We don't need a hero.

Who is going to take responsibility for taking these inexperienced children to such a dangerous scene," said a relative of another missing youth.

Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel decreed on Wednesday two days of official mourning that the state press described as a "fair tribute to those who have fallen in the line of duty."

The families of the disappeared will not be able to celebrate private funerals or bury the remains, since the state of the bone fragments found made it impossible to fully identify them, authorities reported Wednesday.

“In this case, there is no other remedy than for the State, that is, the corresponding authorities, to determine where [the remains] are going to be placed, because no one has the right to take something that is not what corresponds to them,” Jorge González, president of the Cuban Society of Legal Medicine and leader of the experts who reviewed the area, said at a press conference.

A young firefighter works on August 9, 2022 at the fuel depot in Matanzas, in western Cuba, where the largest fire in recorded history occurred on the island.Getty Images

Only two deceased could be identified.

One of them died of his injuries in a hospital and another body was found in the flames at the beginning of the incident.

Noticias Telemundo contacted the Cuban International Press Center to request comments from the authorities, but received no response.

Sent "on a mandatory basis" and "without the necessary training"

The massive fire revived a long-standing debate within Cuba about the mandatory nature of military service, where young people as young as 18 receive training with firearms and artillery and, in many cases, end up providing services that have little to do with the defense of national security.

“Military Service is intended for the defense of the nation and, therefore,

, which anywhere in the world are public services for which it requires training and education," explains Cuban lawyer Eloy Viera Cañive, referring to the recruits who worked as firefighters.

Cuban authorities said they found 14 groups of skeletal remains that they presume correspond to the 14 missing firefighters at the scene of the fire.

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"There are young people who were compulsorily sent to that place [of the fire] without the means of protection, without the security measures and without the necessary training to deal with a phenomenon of these magnitudes," he says.

In May, a Cuban diplomat caused a furor on social networks after affirming before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child that Military Service in Cuba was not compulsory, although the Cuban Penal Code, clarifies the lawyer Viera, establishes as a crime the refusing enlistment and "duties" as a recruit.

“Children are not and will not be recruited in Cuba,” said diplomat Yissel González García.

“Citizens of both sexes who so wish and manifestly express it may voluntarily join military service.”

Independent media inside Cuba have reported in recent months on mothers who denounced pressure from the authorities after refusing to enlist their children and supporting the label #NoAlServicioMilitarObligatorio, relying on the words of the Cuban diplomat at the UN.

Some of them have left the country to settle abroad with their children of enlistment age.

"Victims" of military service

Two families interviewed by Noticias Telemundo said that the disappearance of the recruits in the Matanzas fire reminded them of painful personal stories with military service, which they had no option to resist.

“I am against compulsory military service here in Cuba because I am one more victim of it,” says Rancel Areces, 23, who suffered an accident aboard an improvised boat at 18, when he was a recruit for a unit of marines in Pinar del Río, the westernmost province of Cuba.

Areces, who currently suffers from paralysis on the left side of his body, says that in 2018 he was instructed by his superior to jump off the boat at high speed as part of military training.

Rancel Areces, 23, suffered an accident during military service in Cuba and today suffers from partial paralysis.

His case was not reported by the Cuban authorities.

Courtesy of Rancel Areces.

“The boat went completely over me.

I have 40 stitches on my head.

, ”she recalls.

"I spent 24 days in an induced coma and today the doctors are amazed at my recovery, because they thought I was going to be like a vegetable."

"I didn't want to go to the toilet, as happens with most of the young people here," he adds.

Alfredo González, a resident of Matanzas, says that his son Annier González also did not want to enlist in 2021, when he turned 18.

But the family had no other choice.

The young man was assigned as a guard on the roof of Combinado del Sur, a maximum security prison in Matanzas, and was given an AKM assault rifle, says his father.

Two weeks later he took his own life with the same weapon.

“They put him on guard duty without knowing how to be a prison guard, without knowing if he had a phobia, fear, anxiety,” laments González. “My son was a boy.

He was 18 years old, but he was a child.

And nobody cared about the case because that happened on July 4, and on July 11 all the prosecutors turned to the problem of the protests [against the government]."

The Cuban authorities do not usually publish information on fatal or other incidents in the facilities of the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces where thousands of young people perform military service every year.

González calculates that, if his son had been sent to put out a fire like the one in Matanzas, he would have been in the same position as the relatives of the victims: he would not have been able to prevent it.

“When you are a soldier in the military service you have to follow orders, whether you like it or not,” he says. “In this country it is like that.”