14ymedio, Havana, 4 January 2024 — The new year has already claimed its first victim of fatal violence against women in Cuba. With the murder of Diana Rosa Cervantes Mejías this Tuesday, in Camagüey, the list of femicides opens just three days into 2024.
The attack on Cervantes has not yet been confirmed by independent observers, but several publications on social networks by acquaintances of the victim, collected by CiberCuba, indicate that the alleged aggressor was her partner, who killed her with blows to the head “out of jealousy”.
According to the same sources, Cervantes was the mother of a young child and a resident of the Edén development in the municipal capital of Camagüey province. Her age is not known.
This Monday, the femicide of Nurisbel Guerra, a nurse residing in the Granma municipality of Cauto Cristo, who was on vacation from a medical mission in Venezuela, also made the news. After returning for a short vacation, on December 24 she was murdered by her husband, who committed suicide after cutting her throat. The aggressor, identified as Orestes Tamayo, from whom she intended to separate, was a worker at the province’s Electric Company, the independent media reported.
According to the same sources, Cervantes was the mother of a young child and a resident of the Edén development, in the municipal capital of the province of Camagüey
This December, the official press broke its usual silence to report the femicide of Ohanis Soto in the town of Lincoln, province of Artemisa. After a “domestic altercation” that took place at 6:00 pm on December 28 and which “ended in a fatality”, Soto was stabbed several times by her partner, Osmar Frómeta.
As revealed by the newspaper El Artemiseño, after killing the victim, Frómeta turned himself in to the Police to avoid an alleged “settling of scores” by the Soto family.
So far, Guerra is listed as the last victim of fatal violence against women of 2023, but observers’ attempts to resolve several unconfirmed cases so far, could continue to add to the list.
For their part, both the official press and the authorities maintain their distance from femicide cases, and their promises to prevent and quantify cases of violence against women in real time remain unfulfilled.
The year that just ended closed with a total of 87 confirmed victims of femicide, more than double the figure (36) registered in 2022 by independent observers, who always make mention in their reports the “under-recording” of femicides.
Translated by Norma Whiting
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