After losing her only daughter, Rebeca Juan Delgado has twice suffered the theft of the ossuary that contained her remains in the La Lisa cemetery.
HAVANA, Cuba.- In less than a year, the grave of Rebeca Juan Delgado’s daughter, in the cemetery of the La Lisa municipality, in Havana, has been desecrated twice. “They have stolen the little box that serves as an ossuary for their skeletal remains, and the same thing has happened to dozens of families,” denounced this mother in an exclusive interview with CubaNet.
In May 2025, the independent journalist Yosmany Mayeta Labrada carried out a publication on his Facebook page in which he exposed the theft of approximately 30 ossuaries in the cemetery in question. The thieves left the remains scattered in the green areas and cemeteries, making it impossible for loved ones to identify them.
Rebeca and her husband say that, upon hearing the news, they went to the cemetery and realized that they were among the victims of the desecration. The couple assures that there were more than one hundred cases. Although several families filed a complaint at the police station, to date, the authorities have not provided answers and the thefts in the cemetery continue.
“We paid 3,500 pesos for that ossuary. A gravedigger from the cemetery sold it to us. At the beginning of this year my husband went to the cemetery and realized that, for the second time, the little box from the ossuary had been stolen,” says Rebeca.
Her husband, Luis Nápoles Rosales, says that, on this occasion, he realized that something had happened when the pantheon was found different from the order he usually gives it, and the cover of the tombstone was removed. When he opened the ossuary, he saw his daughter’s remains wrapped in a white sheet, and there was no trace of the ossuary box.
The mother also asserts that the plastic boxes with lids that are used in the cemetery as ossuaries are offered on sales pages on social networks and that they are even used as refrigerators in private businesses.
CubaNet verified this information and found publications of this type, of plastic boxes used as ossuaries, which are priced between 2,300 and 2,800 CUP (between approximately 4 and 6 USD).
The only daughter of Rebeca and Luis, who suffered from a disability, died on October 21, 2022 as a result of dengue.
Upon the father’s complaint, the cemetery administrator provided him with a cement ossuary to deposit the remains. According to Nápoles Rosales, “those are not stolen.”
“My husband even paid one of the gravediggers to take care of the vault, but not even like that. This is an internal problem, only they, the cemetery workers, know in which specific grave those boxes are. Now I wonder if that little box they sold me was stolen from someone else,” says the mother.
“That’s called desecration,” adds Rebeca, “; we no longer know what to do. The police do nothing, the cemetery officials do nothing. I only have to bring the remains home. How long are we going to endure this lack of respect and human sensitivity?”
The Cuban Penal Code includes the crime of “illegal exhumations” in its article 233: “Whoever, without complying with legal formalities, carries out or causes to be carried out an exhumation or the transfer of a corpse or human remains, incurs a penalty of deprivation of liberty from six months to one year or a fine of one hundred to three hundred installments, or both.”
Rebeca Juan Delgado maintains that she feels very bad about what she is experiencing: “Physically I am very bad, my chest hurts, I cry a lot, first because of the pain of losing my daughter three years ago, and now because of what I am going through. I have not even wanted to check if her remains are complete, because I know that there are people who use them to do religious work, and I know that gravediggers sell them too. This has me depressed, I barely sleep… What I need is tranquility, and May they let my daughter rest in peace.”
In recent years there have been recurring complaints of profanations of graves in different provinces of the country: empty coffins, broken tombstones and coffins, scattered remains, open graves, robberies both bones and personal belongings of the deceased and funerary ornaments.
These facts have been recognized even by the official Cuban press. A testimony published in 2023 by the official newspaper Giron explained the situation in the San Carlos Borromeo cemetery, in Matanzas: “When we arrived at the vault we saw several open boxes with the remains missing. There were bones everywhere, it seems that people’s heads and joints were taken. I had never seen anything like it in my life,” the publication reads.
In the La Lisa cemetery, CubaNet He confirmed the existence of dozens of pantheons in poor condition or abandoned, destroyed ossuaries and even scattered skeletal remains. Likewise, the cemetery lacks security guards.
The tombs of ancestors have historically been sacred spaces in different cultures. Caring for the memory and resting places of the dead is the first act of human civilization. If in Cuba the value for life has been lost, respect for the final rest of our loved ones seems to fade more quickly.
