Murder of Two Women Shocks Cienfuegos

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Justo Mora/Mario J. Pentón, Cienfuegos/Miami, 22 May 21 — It was 11:30 in the morning last Thursday when Luis Roque heard the first calls for help. He was about to go to work when his neighbor’s screams made him stop short. “Oh my little daughter, oh my little daughter,” shouted Tomasa Causse Fabat, a 64-year-old nurse on the sidewalk in front of her house in the city of Cienfuegos.

“She was bleeding, I thought something had happened and I ran to help her,” explains Roque. While he was helping Causse Fabat, the woman’s daughter left her house headed in the direction of Roque’s house, just on the other side of 66th Avenue.

“Daylín [Najarro Causse] took refuge in my house with multiple stab wounds in the stomach. My ex-wife and daughter helped her and put a sweater over her wounds to stop the bleeding, but at that moment the killer pursued her there, he continued stabbing her and finally cut her throat before the terrified eyes of my family members,” he adds.

Causse Fabat died a few hours later bleeding to death in the same ward of the hospital where she had worked, a victim of the multiple injuries allegedly caused by Rafael García, her former son-in-law. The nurse had received the internationalist worker’s medal in 2012.

Najarro Causse, 36, had been married to the man whom all the witnesses point to as her murderer and with whom she has a five-year-old girl. At the time of her death, she was three months pregnant by another man.

“I do not know if it was out of hatred or revenge but it was a massacre,” Adrián Najarro, a son and brother of the victims, told 14ymedio by telephone from Cienfuegos.

“Rafael García served a year in prison and had just left prison when he committed the crime,” explains Najarro, who had been accused of abuse and lewd touching of his own daughter.

“The little girl herself said that her father abused her, but since they did not find evidence, they only sentenced him to one year and six months in prison for a misdemeanor, something like exhibitionism,” laments the relative of the victims, aged 34, who maintains that “the laws are very weak” and that is what allowed this crime to be perpetrated.

Najarro, a teacher by profession, relates that several witnesses said that on that same Thursday the supposed culprit went to look for another ex-partner, but fortunately the woman hid, which prevented him from killing her. Other witnesses said that García also went to look for his daughter in the kindergarten, but the teachers did not hand him the girl over to him because they knew of his sentence.

“I feel bad, I do not have words to describe what I’m going through, it’s been a terrible day for me, I’m alone in the world with my niece,” she adds.

Rafael Garcia also caused minor injuries to Tomasa Causse Fabat’s husband, who tried to defend her by hitting him with a bat.

“I just want justice and for him to pay for what he did to my mother and my sister,” Najarro demands.

A neighbor of the San Lázaro district who witnessed the double crime told this newspaper that after murdering his ex-wife, García “put the knife in a black bag that he threw over his back, got on the bike and left for the Avenue as if nothing had happened.”

By then a good number of the residents of the block were crowded in front of the house where the crime had been committed and had already alerted the authorities.

“When the first patrol cars arrived, the aggressor went up the hill towards the Avenue and passed on the other side of them, people started shouting and pointing and that’s how they caught him,” said the same woman.

Another neighbor on the block who spoke with 14ymedio via telephone said she felt “extremely affected” by the crime. “We have always gotten along well on this block, we never thought we would see something like that,” she laments.

The city of Cienfuegos (150,000 inhabitants) shuddered last February with the murder of the young Luis Santacruz Labrada, aged 23 at the hands of a minor. In October of last year a young woman named Leidy Maura Pacheco Mur, aged 18, was raped by three men who later killed her.

The Cuban government does not publish official figures on the number of violent acts on the island and the crimes are rarely addressed by the official press. Mariela Castro, daughter of former Cuban President Raúl Castro and president of the National Center for Sex Education (Cenesex), said in January of this year that there were no femicides in Cuba and that this was an achievement of the 1959 Revolution led by her father and uncle.

In Cuba there is no specific legislation for sexist violence and the Cuban Penal Code does not address aggravations of this type. The cases of women who die at the hands of their boyfriends or husbands are addressed in court like any other homicide.

“A few weeks ago, another woman was murdered with machetes on 75th Street, near the Tulipán district, but unfortunately, the local media do not talk about most of the crimes that take place in the city,” says a doctor from the provincial hospital of Cienfuegos. He does not want to reveal his identity for fear of losing his job.

“Every day there are people injured with knives. This same Monday a patient arrived with several stab wounds. We need, as a society, to reflect on what is happening.”

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