According to the Attorney General, 72% of the victims were between 25 and 59 years old
14ymedio/EFE, Havana, July 29, 2024 — The Council of Ministers of Cuba approved this Sunday a national system of “registration, attention, following and monitoring” of gender violence and resulting femicides on the Island, the official media reported on Monday. The measure was presented by the Attorney General, Yamila Peña Ojeda, and will be made up of a group of 25 experts from the Ministry of the Interior and the Popular Supreme Court.
In an article published by Granma that reviews the meeting, the official media does not clarify whether the information collected on that platform will be made public. In any case, the newspaper says that it will be an “administrative register (…) for the management of criminal proceedings” that aims to “have statistical information for prevention in the fight against acts of gender violence,” especially in the family environment.
Peña proceeded to reveal statistics for gender violence on the Island, where in 2023, 75% of these cases occurred in family homes – “a trend that continues this year,” Granma clarifies. Seventy-two percent (72%) of the victims were between 25 and 59 years old; 45% were unpaid workers; and “the survivors who suffered mistreatment during a relationship were also identified, as were those who made previous complaints about threats or injuries that were sometimes withdrawn as part of the cycle of violence.”
In the case of the aggressors, 84% were partners or former partners of the victims, and 46% had attended school only up to the ninth grade
In the case of the aggressors, 84% were partners or former partners of the victims; 46% had attended school only up to the ninth grade; 40% worked, and 31% had a criminal record of violence. The Attorney General also pointed out that there were other common characteristics among the profiles of the aggressors, such as dissatisfaction with the rupture of the romantic relationship with the victims, the tendency to use the children “to inflict more suffering” and the use of knives and firearms.
Despite the policy of silence of the media and the authorities in the face of cases of gender violence, Peña defended the importance of managing figures and producing statistics to create prevention plans. Whether the figures will be made public was not clarified .
In Cuba, femicide is not classified as a crime, and information about gender murders in the official press is always scarce. Faced with this reality, it is the observatories and independent media who in recent years have carried out the count of cases, often hindered by the lack of access to criminal records and the fear of many families to report femicides or violence.
Cuba closed the first half of the year with 28 femicides verified by feminist groups, 43% less than in the same period of the previous year, a fall that activists attribute mainly to their growing difficulties in ratifying the information. In 2023, 87 people were killed, compared to 34 in 2022 and 36 in 2021.
In June of last year, the ruling Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) presented the Cuban Observatory on Gender Equality, which would include statistics of “women who have been victims of intentional homicide as a result of gender violence in the last 12 months.” The organization, however, limited itself to figures in 2022 and only includes femicides with firm sentences. So far the official platform has not disseminated the data that it planned to update at the end of June of this year.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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