Madrid/Yosley Hernández, 36, died this Friday in a work accident at ammunition factory number 4 of the Empresa Militar Industrial (EMI) Ernesto Che Guevara company. The industry, located in La Campana, in Manicaragua, Villa Clara, experienced another fatal accident just two months ago, and according to one former worker who regretted the event this Friday, “this type of accident happens very frequently in that company.”
Hernández, a native of Potrero Grande, but resident in Güinía de Miranda, was handling a projectile that exploded, seriously injuring him. According to information that has circulated on social networks, a co-worker tried to help him until the rescue services arrived, but no one could do anything to prevent the fatal outcome.
Several colleagues and family members have mourned the death on social networks, while the official press remains silent about this accident, which would be the second fatal one in just a month. Around May 20, the explosion of an acetylene cylinder while two workers were welding a piece caused the death of both.
Around May 20, the explosion of an acetylene cylinder while two workers were welding a piece caused the death of both
According to various information, the victims were Fredy Toledo, a worker with years of experience residing in La Campana; and his assistant, the 23-year-old young man Marcos Chacón, from Ciro Redondo.
The Ernesto Che Guevara Military Industrial Company was inaugurated in 1962 and defined, on its 40th birthday, as a pioneer of business improvement within the Revolutionary Armed Forces. The company, which owns several facilities in the territory, was initially called La Campana Tool Factory and changed its name to its current name in 1985. For decades it has employed more than a thousand people in the province, being one of the largest centers of work of Villa Clara.
Since 2017, as part of the sanctions approved by the Donald Trump Government for companies linked to the Armed Forces, the factory was included in the list of Cuban entities restricted from carrying out transactions for being an “organism directly linked to the defense and security”.
Hernández’s death is added to the list of deaths in work accidents this year. In 2023, 1,491 events of this type occurred, of which 49 were fatal. Although there was a decrease compared to the previous year, when 51 people died in 1,668 incidents, the drop – still unknown in magnitude – in the population and workers specifically prevents contextualizing the data.
The sectors with the most dead workers were Community Services Activities of Associations and Personals (8), construction, basic supplies and agriculture (with 7 each) and the sugar industry (5). The public administration, defense and social security sector regrets a single death in 2023, according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (Onei).
In 2023, 1,491 events of this type occurred, of which 49 were fatal.
At the beginning of this June, a worker at the Cárdenas Oil Drilling and Extraction Company, in Matanzas, died after inhaling toxic gases during the repair of a leak. The news was spread by the company, belonging to Unión Cuba Petróleo (Cupet), which regretted the death of the worker without further details about the event.
In March of this year, Leonel Carroso Machín, a lineman from the Havana Electric Company who fell from a pole in the municipality of Boyeros, died approximately twenty days after the death of another colleague, Daniel Vega de la Cruz, from Matanzas, also after a fall of the same type, when he was repairing an electrical fault.
This February, three stevedores also died in the port of Santiago de Cuba after inhaling lethal gases after opening a container that had been fumigated.
The most serious recent workplace accident remains the Matanzas Supertanker Base fire in 2022, in which several firefighters and state employees died trying to contain the fire in the oil tanks.
