Vienna, May 7, 2023. As part of the commemorative parade for the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the Cuban Embassy in Austria, together with the Austria-Cuba Friendship Association (ÖKG) organized a solemn activity in front of the plaque commemorating the five Cuban anti-fascist fighters who were victims of the Nazi-fascist regime in that place.
In front of the plaque located on a wall behind the barracks where thousands of people were interned and murdered, the Cuban Ambassador, Pablo Berti Oliva, paid tribute to the memory of the Cubans Roberto Cortezón Martínez, Félix Llanos Alonso, Alberto Sánchez Martínez, José Luis Pérez Arocha and Manuel Sola Castillo, who after fighting on the side of the Spanish Republic, as part of the internationalist contingent during the Civil War in that country, were captured in France under the Vichy regime, to be later sent to Mauthausen.
Faced with the dangers of the resurgence of Nazi and fascist ideas and racist and xenophobic policies, the Cuban ambassador called on all of us to unite to say never again to fascism and so that the world would never again witness the indescribable horrors that were experienced in Mauthausen.
Between 1938 and 1945, around 140,000 people from 40 nations were killed in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex, now an international place of remembrance and of political and historical education.
(Embacuba Austria/Cubaminrex)