Violent crimes keep intensifying in Cuba along with repression and hunger

Yaricel Hernández González, one of the 38 Cuban women murdered this year

From our Bureau of Tropical Socialist Utopias

Castro, Inc.’s police are very good at stifling dissent, but it is now becoming very clear to Cubans that they are very inept at crime prevention.

Violent crimes have become a constant topic of conversation on Cuban social media and independent diaspora websites.

Yesterday, the number of women murdered since January climbed to 38. These crimes are occurring throughout the length of the island, not just in large cities. The latest victim, Anisleysi Rodríguez Mesero was “brutally” killed in El Cerro neighborhood, Havana. A day earlier, two women were murdered in eastern Cuba, and the day before that a woman was murdered in Sancti Spiritus. And two days before that, a woman was murdered in Las Tunas.

Most of these “feminicides” are being committed by partners, boyfriends, or husbands, many of whom are the fathers of their victim’s children. Burglaries and muggings continue to multiply too, and many of the criminals manage to elude capture.

Welcome to paradise.

Loosely translated from Diario de Cuba

Feminicides, searches that end with the disappeared murdered, assaults that claim more and more victims… Violence has prevailed for months in Cuba. Despite the discourse that the Government tries to amplify, in a country where the authoritarian regime is the holder of violence, these are facts that show the latent insecurity on the Island.

The propaganda of the supposed ethics of the police forces clashes with the absence of an effective strategy to confront crime. From profiles on social networks linked to State Security and the Ministry of the Interior, an image laundering is sought for the Police, when in those very virtual spaces there are plenty of examples in which Cubans take justice into their own hands and often do the work of law enforcement officers. And, while no effort is spared to harass activists and dissident voices, the absence of patrols results in assaults and robberies in daylight.

Between February 1 and so far this year, DIARIO DE CUBA has reported more than a dozen murders, most of them victims of robberies, not counting femicide crimes, the number of which has risen to 35 so far this year, according to the sub-registration of independent Cuban feminist platforms. These figures are a small sample of what is happening in Cuba and whose real dimension is unknown in the absence of official statistics.

“Let security return to the streets,” requested the Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, Dionisio García Ibáñez, after the home of the parents of a Catholic Church priest in that demarcation suffered an assault that almost cost them their lives.

Continue reading HERE in Spanish