The Cuban Ministry of Transport (Mitrans) released this saturday a formal response to the citizen Rosa María Rodríguez Pupo, who on Thursday, May 12, denounced on the social network Facebook a series of mistreatment and indiscipline that occurred in the Bus Terminal, in Havana, where a day before her sister was prevented from Diana Pupo traveling to Holguín despite having a paid reservation.
After a group of investigations carried out by a commission in the companies of Ómnibus Nacionales and Viajero, involved in the events, “it was possible to verify the veracity of a set of indiscipline and breaches of the established procedures, in the negligent act of workers belonging to both organizations, both in Havana and in the province of Holguín,” Mitrans said in a note released on the organization’s official channels on social networks.
Said communication responds to the complaints of Rodríguez Pupo, who offered details about the ordeal that she and her sister experienced in the capital terminal on May 11 at night. On that day, Diana Pupo had to travel to Holguín with a reservation made well in advance through the Viajando application, but when she arrived at the station located on Avenida Independencia and 19 de Mayo, she found that her ticket had been refunded. .
Surprised by this irregularity, she asked the terminal service personnel (workers and shift managers) for explanations, but found no answers. On the contrary, Diana Pupo was accused of not using the Viajando application correctly to reserve the ticket, in addition to being subjected to a series of abuses and mistreatment.
In the first order, they dispatched him and charged him for his luggage and even came to propose a kind of “business”, through which, if he paid a certain amount of money, he could board the bus. Rosa María Rodríguez, Diana’s sister, assured that they told a shift manager about the problems and never heard from this person again.
Everything happened in a hostile, sexist environment marked by gender violence, as Rosa María Rodríguez herself described in her post, who revealed that her sister was pressured into a closed room with up to five men around her.
“In correspondence with the seriousness of the events, nine disciplinary measures were applied both to those directly involved, as well as to the bosses who had to prevent it: five definitive separations from the entity, a definitive job change and a temporary one with different working conditions and two reprimands before the groups of workers”, specified the Mitrans statement.
In addition, other organizational and control measures were applied to prevent similar events, and the analysis was extended to the rest of the Terminals and Passenger Agencies in the country. All the results of this investigation were communicated to Rosa María Rodríguez and her sister Diana Pupo, who expressed their satisfaction with “the immediacy, the depth of the analyzes and that the facts did not go unpunished and had consequences for those responsible,” says the report. text.
Precisely, after knowing the sanctions to those involved in the violations, Rosa María Rodríguez also highlighted from Facebook that we cannot forget our citizen rights and our civic duties to denounce, demands to which the government has the responsibility to respond.
“This fight goes to all those women who have been violated, attacked, discriminated against, to all those women and men who suffer abuses of power every day in this country. Let’s not stay to wait for them to do for us and us. The change starts from one,” wrote Rodríguez Pupo, who said she was proud of her sister’s courage and grateful for the support of all the people who showed solidarity with her case, especially the vice minister of transportation for accompanying her and her sister in the process.
