"He said to me ’you’re a faggot’ and stuck his knife in me"

Campos is a promoter of the Network of Men who have sex with other men (HSH), associated with the Ministry of Public Health. (Y.C.)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Luz Escobar, Havana, 12 September 2018 — “I was the fly on that night’s cake for them,” laments Yoan Campos Guevara, 26, the young man who was attacked with a knife on Friday in Villa Clara in what appears to be homophobic assault. The son of singer Juan Carlos Campos, he lives in Caibarién and was leaving a party organized by the local LGBTI community at ‘Juanito’s Easy Chair’ when he was attacked, as he explained to 14ymedio from the Arnaldo Milián Castro Provincial Hospital in Santa Clara, where he is recovering from the surgery he underwent after the attack.

“Almost everyone had gone home but I stayed a little longer, there were five boys none of whom, as far as the little I could see, were older than 18. They stopped behind me, but I did not turn around. I finally got up to leave, I already had one of them behind me,” says Campos, who feels able to identify his main attacker. “When he was behind me, he said, ’You’re a faggot,’” and he buried a blade in me which didn’t hurt. I started to get scared when I felt something hot coming out of my back, and when I put my hands there I saw the blood running down,” he continues.

Yoan Campos Guevara is a dental assistant at the Pablo Agüero Guedes de Caibarién Polyclinic and promoter of the Network of Men who have sex with other men (HSH), associated with the Ministry of Health (Minsap) and in coordination with the Cenesex, which is directed by Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela Castro.

Although now he admits to feeling “pretty good,” his voice, clear and strong, fades away when he remembers what happened. “I ran out to get help, but it was 4:30 in the morning and no one was going to get involved with a badly injured person, so two security guards at a nearby hotel — because this happened in a relatively public place, it was not in the dark — they put me on a scooter,” he says.

Campos, who did not lose consciousness, relates that on that trip he saw his attackers. “They were walking very happy, like someone who had thrown water on a dog,” he laments. Seeing them walking along the road “as if it was nothing” and “without any remorse” took away his desire to forgive them and he now announces that he will take it to the end to make the guilty ones pay for their crimes.

A few minutes after he was admitted, a policeman came to inform him of the arrest of the alleged perpetrators, who are from Santa Clara, and told him that the weapon used was a knife. “They have been informing me of everything and I have learned that one of the boys was responsible for the stabbing and is awaiting trial, they also say that he confessed, and that the other four are still detained,” he says.

The specialists at the hospital in Caibarién where he was initially admitted managed to stop the bleeding. He was later transferred to Remedios, where his wound was sutured and he had blood tests, but finally he had to be taken to Santa Clara because some of the blood had passed into his lung. According to his testimony, Remedios’ surgeon warned him that “if the wound had been a few millimeters higher” it would have pierced his heart.

His father, the well-known tenor Juan Carlos Campos, explained that at the hospital “they put a drain on his side because the knife cut caused a pneumothorax (collapsed lung) and he had blood and air in his lung.”Also, this Tuesday they did some tests that will be evaluated today by the doctors to decide whether to remove part of the drain and they will evalute later if he can be discharged, at best, at the end of this week.

Juan Carlos Campos believes that there is a set of people who are “homophobic and half criminals who are doing nothing and are a danger. He was on his cell phone, communicating after the holidays when everything happened,” says the father of the young man about that night, as if he wanted to go back in time. “The people in the neighborhood, his friends and all his co-workers” have been calling the hospital to find out about his son because “everyone loves him very much,” he says with satisfaction.

Yoan Campos was operated on after the knife attack for a perforated lung. (Y.C.)

Yoan Campos, who confesses that he never thought something like this could happen to him, feels very grateful for the attention that his co-workers, friends and the LGBTI community have shown for his condition. “The provincial coordinator of the Network of men who have sex with other men visited me here. I did not expect that attention on a human level,” he says.

Pedro Manuel González, an LGBTI activist from the area, told Radio Martí that he is convinced that it is a hate crime because “there is an aversion towards these people.”

In mid-2017, another young homosexual, José Enrique Morales Besada, who lived in Morón, Ciego de Ávila, was beaten in the middle of the street by unknown persons who insulted him for being gay, although his case has not yet reached the courts. In May 2015, this newspaper announced the death by stoning of a 24-year-old transsexual in the city of Pinar del Río, but the official media never published the news.

Thanks to the work of members of the Cuban LGBTI community, more and more information and reports on aggressions and hate crimes can be documented. Although official institutions do not publish statistics on murders or violent acts against transvestites, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders and intersexuals, at present the news filters out through social networks and independent media.

The Cuban Penal Code does not address the concept of “hate crimes” in the case of assaults against people based on ethnic origin, religion, race, gender, orientation and sexual identity. The latter, in particular, are not called out in the current legislation and these crimes are processed by the police and the courts without an aggravating circumstance that takes into account the vulnerability of this group of people.

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