CSI: Havana / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

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Freedom has disappeared. The crime occurred years ago in Cuba and they still haven’t found the culprit. The investigators discovered, in the days following the event, evidence that led to a suspect, but without a body to prove the crime, they never had a case. But they quickly mobilized the entire police force to look for some clue that would lead them to the place where she had been snatched and gagged, because initially they thought it was a kidnapping and the agents knew that in order to recover the victim alive it’s critical to find her in the first 72 hours.

The people who knew the victim, allege that she was omnipresent and so they noted her absence very quickly. The investigative process has been long and tortuous because many of the potential witnesses associated with her have left to look for her in other countries and so it has been hard for the officials to interrogate them and get their version of the facts.

Even though this alleged crime still, today, is among the “unresolved cases” of the archipelago, many haven’t stopped working on it and the long list of evidence around it lengthens. The maxim, “he who has a mobile phone is suspect,” of many police officers, was discredited by government leaders when they authorized the use of mobile phones for ordinary Cubans.

After several decades of work, some think that the authorities have given up on the case, but the independent criminal investigators, unlike those in the Interior Ministry in the capital — who have been on the case since the beginning — haven’t given up on finding who did it, who victimized all the children in Cuba, and they won’t allow the file to be closed.

The police suspect that it could be a homicide, as no one disappears for so many years without a trace. At this point in the tragedy it’s clear that a new team is needed, with focus and different viewpoints, a chance to review the experts’ notes, the DNA, the fingerprints and odors, to reassess the profile of the kidnapper or the murderer, so that working with forensic scientists they can reconstruct where the victim was last seen, and with the help of H.G.Wells’ time machine, catch the thief before we are deprived of this mother who is essential for the health of the people.

April 4 2011