‘Alas Tensas’ Clarifies That ‘The Disappearance Alert for Yeniset Rojas is Still Open’

The young woman from Villa Clara Yeniset Rojas Pérez. (Alas Tensas)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 19 January 2023 — The independent feminists of the platform Yo Sí Te Creo in Cuba and the magazine Alas Tensas retracted, this Thursday, the statement issued hours before in which Yeniset Rojas Pérez, the young woman from Ranchuelo, Villa Clara, who had disappeared as of the 18th of March of last year, was considered to be dead.

In a subsequent publication, they confirm that “an alleged attacker is under police investigation for his her, and this person has a history of violence and assaults against women” and they hope that “investigations will conclude the truth about this case and preventive measures are taken.”

Yo Sí Te Creo [I Do Believe You] apologized for the information published at the beginning, which would be, they assured, deleted from their networks. “The work of verification in the conditions of Cuba has these unfortunate setbacks. That is why the transparency of the Cuban institutions is vital, as we demand,” they conclude in the new text. “Yeniset Rojas’s disappearance alert is still open.”

The clarification of these organizations coincides with what Rojas Pérez’s brother, the playwright Yerandy Fleites, said to 14ymedio. The young man explained that there is “a strong clue, a suspect,” but he regretted that the networks are “full of false news”. It was not true, he insists, “that until now the specific fate of my sister is known,” and he expressed: “All this that we live is very sad but we are encouraged by the consolation that perhaps everything will be clarified.”

Ever since the 33-year-old woman, the mother of a 10-year-old girl, disappeared in broad daylight at the time she was returning from her work as an administrator at the Ranchuelo high school, her family and friends have not stopped waiting for her and have denounced the inaction of the authorities on the case.

“We feel that apathy, we have felt it, it is felt,” Fleites declared when this newspaper spoke with him more than eight months ago. “There hasn’t been a much-vaunted ’social worker’ assisting this family, there hasn’t been anything at all.”

Rojas, her brother explained then, was the pillar of their home, “a true warrior of life.” Of her disappearance, in all this time, no official media has reported on it.

The last desperate call from his mother, Iraina Pérez Valdés, in networks was on Christmas Eve, when it was 276 days after the disappearance. “She disappeared yes, but absent, never,” she wrote in her publication, where she had no choice but to appeal to “a miracle.”

That of Rojas Pérez had been the second femicide recorded by Alas Tensas and the Yo Sí Te Creo platform in 2023, after the murder, on January 5, of Dr. Damaris Rodríguez Domínguez. Last year, the number of women murdered by their partners or ex-partners rose to 34, an alarming figure considering the country’s population.

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