14ymedio, Havana, July 24, 2023 — The platform Yo Sí Te Creo en Cuba (YSTC) [Yes I Do Believe You] confirmed this Thursday the femicide of Ruselay Castillo Matos, murdered on July 18 in Cárdenas, Matanzas. With her death, the number of victims of sexist violence on the Island rises to 54 so far this year.
According to the observatory, the young woman, 31 years old and a resident in the town of the Humberto Álvarez, was murdered by her partner. Castillo, a housewife and native of the town of Santa Marta, was the mother of two teenagers.
In the absence of figures and official records, gender platforms and independent media continue to report the occurrence of femicides on the Island. Recently learned of is the death of Leidy Mariam Durruty García, 32, who died on July 16 in San José de las Lajas, Mayabeque.
The newspaper El Vigía de Cuba, which initially reported the incident, told that the event occurred when Durruty García was returning from a piano-bar at dawn, a moment that her ex-husband took advantage of to attack her with a knife. The attacker, according to the media, voluntarily turned himself in to the Police.
The murderer has been identified by the name of Luis Socarrás, also 32 years old and born in Santiago de Cuba. A neighbor of the victim explained that the couple had an unstable relationship with successive reunions in which violence sometimes mediated.
The Committee on Constitutional and Legal Affairs of the Parliament, in a session held on July 19, pointed out gender violence as one of the crimes to which the Prosecutor’s Office devotes the most attention and efforts, but this was the only criminal category for which they did not offer figures or statistics.
This March, the Federation of Cuban Women announced with great fanfare the creation of a Gender Observatory that will include updated records of femicides and other expressions of sexist violence. However, the institution has not commented on the wave of sexist violence that the Island is suffering and that is close to doubling, in half a year, the number of femicides for all of 2022.
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