“Fear on the buses, in lonely streets, empty parks at night, windows and doors secured before dark,” lists the official magazine ‘Bohemia’
14ymedio, Havana, 30 November 2024 — A short time ago, the digital magazine Bohemia presented a meticulous report about the rise of violence in Cuba. Interspersed between minor works, the text provides desolate figures – and many testimonies – from a survey whose scope was not revealed. Some 92.3% of those interviewed consider that crime has increased a lot, and 48.9% have been a direct victim in the last six months or know a victim. One-third do not trust the authorities to report the crime, and of those who did, 73.4% “did not see a solution to their complaint.”
In addition, after “various interviews conducted, and sociological, criminal and anthropological studies consulted,” they conclude that almost half of Cubans can list 10 or more violent crimes that occurred in the last semester. Eighty-three percent have completely changed their routines and have developed strategies to stay safe.
In a few years, argues Bohemia, the rise in crime in Cuba has been directly proportional to the deterioration of life, the “loss of values,” the increasingly massive “vulnerabilities” and the debacle of the “solution mechanisms” of conflicts by the Police. The magazine resorts to euphemisms and asks to consult the official data; it has no choice but to admit that the authorities usually have their lips sealed in this regard.
The magazine resorts to euphemisms and asks to consult the official data; it has no choice but to admit that the authorities usually have their lips sealed
“However,” they ironize, “comparative statistical sites such as Infobae and Numbeo report that Cuba is among the countries with the lowest crime rates in America.”
Although banditry and crimes of gender violence in rural areas are undeniable, it is in municipal capitals and large towns where the increase in crime is perceived with particular intensity. “There is fear on the buses, in lonely dark streets and empty parks, and windows and doors are secured before dark,” says Bohemia.
In Guantánamo, the magazine reports, the official announcer David Alexis González, who was sleeping, was stabbed to death in his own house by robbers. The authorities of the Ministry of the Interior took three months to provide an official version, and only after they had captured the alleged murderers.
Providing information, Bohemia regrets, is “a rare practice” in the Police and is almost always done late, despite the fact that the “unofficial media and Facebook profiles” had already offered details of the case.
The “alternative media” are the evidence, the magazine reasons, that there is “a need for information that is still unsatisfied, due to the lack of official spaces that clarify and provide figures on this type of event. That insufficiency does not disappear; it is redirected to various alternative channels of communication.”
The “alternative media” are the evidence, the magazine reasons, that there is “a still-unsatisfied need for information”
Bohemia distinguishes a spectrum of independent media from those that have “sensationalist traits” and “lack rigor and professionalism” to those that, they recognize, are serious, but “intend to sell Cuba as an unsafe country.” “But the truth is that yes, on the networks there are also complaints of real events. Some of them increase popular interest, causing a response, generally late, from the state media.”
“Yesterday they stole a propane tank from a doctor who lives from hand to mouth, and last week they tried to enter a garage near the nursing home. A neighbor woke up, turned on the light, and that’s why they left. I bolt my door with a Yale lock, latch the windows and put sticks and stones behind the door. If someone breaks in, at least it will make noise and wake me up.” This is how a woman of 50 years old interviewed by Bohemia expressed herself, “almost paranoid,” during a nocturnal conversation with her daughter.
Cuban houses are “a Sing Sing prison,” the woman joked, with a nervous laugh. Her fear is not based on what she reads on social networks, the magazine narrows down, but on her own experiences and on what she reads in the newspapers, “official or not.”
Another statement, from Elizabeth Bello – a girl from Havana – tells the story of the theft of her cell phone. When she took out her phone on Belascoaín Street at three in the afternoon, “two teenagers punched her in the neck, which made her fall to the ground, and they wrenched her cell phone away from her.” Bello attributed the robbery to the fact that she had been mistaken “for a foreigner.” “I immediately made the complaint. I was in the Police Unit until two in the morning, almost 12 hours!”
Daily life in Cuba is rapidly deteriorating, and the Criminal Law, Bohemia regrets, “is not an instrument of change”
Daily life in Cuba is rapidly deteriorating, and the Criminal Law, Bohemia regrets, “is not an instrument of change.” Crime cannot be eradicated without an improvement in living conditions. “Legal sector managers link the significant increase in crime in our nation to the scarcity of resources, goods and food and high inflation.” The response of the Prosecutor’s Office, they point out, has been to judge “property crime with greater rigor.”
On the other hand, there are more and more ex-convicts who commit crimes again because “it is difficult for them to find work and even be received by their families.” The stigmatization and the fact that they return to the same environment of poverty from which they came “are stimuli to recidivism.”
The buses and their stops – especially in the capital – are an environment of frequent crimes. Leonardo Rodríguez, waiting to board a P6 to Mantilla, saw two young people brandishing knives at each other, each belonging to different gangs – with members of both sexes – who looked at them from afar, armed with knives and machetes. The stop was in the middle of the “battlefield” that, with stones, was then formed. There were women and children. “That’s normal here; it happens almost every day,” Rodríguez said.
In this type of neighborhood, life is characterized by “the loss of values and the educational crisis, laziness and the delegitimization of work as a source of income, machismo and violence,” lists Bohemia.
Gender violence is separate issue, and Bohemia is scandalized that the most complete data offered by the Government are from a date as far away as 2016. Femicides are the “most followed” cases due to their importance. For researchers, the absence of official information leaves a “bad taste” since they cannot determine if there is really an increase in cases or “if in reality there was always a similar number of cases that were not classified as such.”
Women who suffer sexist violence clash with the “insensitivity of officials”
Women who suffer sexist violence clash with the “insensitivity of officials,” the magazine insists. “Questioning the victims when making the complaint, dismissal of danger or the seriousness that the situation implies, delays in taking statements in the PNR [National Revolutionary Police] Units or in the collection of evidence at the scene, exposure of the victims to the reconstruction of the story too many times”: everything influences the “loss of confidence” in the Police that is currently confirmed.
In this sense, they emphasize “a detail”: “The police forces are also affected by the prevailing socioeconomic panorama, which causes a decrease in police personnel in charge of attending, processing and solving crimes. In the end, neither victims nor perpetrators nor executors escape the context.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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