14ymedio, Havana, 4 April 2023 — A woman died this Tuesday after leaping from the top floor of a high-rise apartment building in the central Carlos J. Finlay avenue in Camagüey. The news became known, like so much else that the official press does not report, through social networks, and was confirmed to 14ymedio by the funeral home where her body was held in the afternoon. From there her identity and her approximate age were reported: her name was Lourdes Arias Morales and she was about 50 years old.
Around 8 in the morning, on-line commenter Egberto Ángel Escobedo Morales shared, “a lady dressed in a guard’s uniform and who apparently does not live in this building, decides to take her own life by jumping from this 12-story building,” which, he says, “has the record of about 15 suicides including this one, according to the residents.”
Escobedo Morales attached in his post photos of the body covered with a sheet, at the foot of the stairs of the building, one of the most recognizable in the city, and denounced: “It is 9:35 am and legal medicine has not yet arrived, just a patrol car that covered the body.”
Around the unidentified body, the slogans painted on the walls of the building’s entrance – “The country is worth more than life”, “No one surrenders here” – gave the scene an even more gloomy air.
And he continued: “The social and economic crisis unfortunately increases the cases of suicide, crimes and all kinds of violence in the desperate Cuban population.”
In the same city, last February, the official press confirmed the death of Michel Amodia Ferrer, director of the Camagüey Business Business Group, which his relatives reported was by suicide.
The data published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (Onei) indicate a rise in the number of suicides in Cuba in 2021, the last year recorded, although the Government does not call them that, but rather deaths from “intentionally self-inflicted injuries.” The rate per 100,000 inhabitants went from 14 in 2017 to 16 four years later.
Although the Island has the highest suicide rate on the continent, according to figures from the World Bank and other institutions, such as the Pan American Health Organization, the official media rarely address the issue.
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