The parents of the Cuban Catholic priest Leandro Naun were assaulted this Monday in the Santa María neighborhood, on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba. Three masked men, who broke into his house around midnight to steal, were discovered by Elsy Hung, the priest’s mother. In her escape, they beat up the woman and struck a machete blow over the head of her husband, Nelson Naun.
The thieves entered the house through “a side door of the home, affected by the rains these days,” he told 14ymedio the priest, visiting Italy, and who denounced the morning of this monday the crime. His father is now waiting for an operation at the hospital, although he has already been able to communicate with him and assures that “a fracture occurred, but no neuronal damage.”
“The thieves, before taking something, were first in the refrigerator eating and drinking water,” he argues, as a symptom of the moral deterioration that the country is experiencing. “All the violence is unleashed upon being discovered” by her mother, who ended up kicking herself to the ground and asking for help. Facing the thieves, her father, who had come to her aid, was wounded.
Naun refers that his colleagues in the diocese of Santiago de Cuba immediately expressed their concern and that the archbishop’s driver, Luis, was the one who came to his house during the early hours of the morning to transfer his father to the hospital for the operation, because, according to they informed the family, “there is no ambulance.”
The priest considers the crime as a “manifestation of the acute crisis” of the Island, in addition to reflecting “the loss of all value and criminal impunity.”
The priest considers the crime as a “manifestation of the acute crisis” of the Island, in addition to reflecting “the loss of all value and criminal impunity.” Despite everything, he considers it useful to denounce what happened in the midst of the current “wave of violence”: “My testimony is to help hundreds of cases that suffer the same or worse situation but are anonymous due to lack of impact.”
Asked if these assaults can be considered as an indirect reprisal against the Catholic Church, Naun is blunt: “We have no proof.” The Police, he adds, continue to investigate the incident and look for those responsible, which the priest characterized as “three thin, masked young men.”
On May 19, the priest Eliosbel Pereira, rector of the church of San Francisco in Santiago de Cuba also suffered an assault with machetes to steal his motorcycle. The news was released after Dionisio García Ibáñez, archbishop of that diocese, sent a statement via WhatsApp.
According to the journalist Adrián Martínez Cádiz, the attacker, who was disguised as a doctor, gave the priest “a deep wound on his left hand” with a machete. For this reason, Pereira had to undergo surgery at the Santiago de Cuba provincial hospital, “in a complex operation that lasted several hours where the hand was reconstructed.”
On April 29, the Church of San Charbel and Santo Tomás de Villanuevalocated in the Havana municipality of Playa, and a week before, there was an attempted robbery at the San Juan María Vianney Priestly House.
Two other thefts occurred on March 7 and April 5, respectively, in the Sacred Heart parish and the Jesús Obrero chapel, both located in El Vedado, both under the responsibility of the Dominican friar Lester Zayas, one of the priests. more critical of the regime.
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