We continue to lose the heroes from our parents’ and grandparents’ generations who fought so valiantly for freedom in Cuba. Requiescat in pace, Omar Pernet Hernandez.
A Cuban hero died in Louisville – and no one noticed
The camera shakes and zooms in clumsily. Good video technique is not the priority here, it’s the story coming out of his mouth that matters.
He speaks slowly and calmly, retelling a life spent standing up for human rights and against communist oppression.
Omar Pernet Hernandez was 14 years old when Fidel Castro overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959. Eventually, he spent 22 years in Cuban prisons.
“I was tortured in Castros’ jails in four trials since 1965,” Pernet Hernandez once said in an interview. A series of YouTube videos documents his life story fighting the Cuban regime.
Pernet Hernandez, who came to Louisville in 2012 as a political refugee, died last year on Oct. 7 at the age of 72. Largely unknown in his adopted city, he fought cancer as bravely as he fought the Cuban government.
“He never let those struggles or his history in Cuba keep him from living life to the fullest, even when everything worked against him,” said Chris Clements, who worked at Catholic Charities helping Pernet Hernandez settle here. “We always admired him for that.”
In 2009, Pernet Hernandez testified before the United Nations Human Rights Council, in Geneva, on the conditions in Cuba.
“We all supported the change of government because we understood that it was necessary due to the situation our country was in,” Pernet says, in Spanish, in one of his videos.
“My break with the Castro regime came with the imposition of military service, I refused and in 1965 they took me to the UMA concentration camps for young people who did not sympathize with their policy, including those who were homosexuals and the religious,” he says. “There together with thousands of young people, we worked from sun up to sun down, cutting cane and banana trees.”
Pernet said he was later arrested and spent eight years in prison for joking with friends about taking a boat to the United States. In 1992, he was arrested for hanging propaganda posters against the Cuban government.
During his time in prison, he went on several hunger strikes and endured humiliation, multiple beatings, solitary confinement and starvation.
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Sorry. Bad Negro. Doesn’t fit the narrative. Massah Castro can’t have that, and his numerous foreign sympathizers oblige him as always. Move along.