Yanet Martínez Guzmán, 47, is the most recent victim of sexist violence in Cuba, which has claimed the lives of four women so far in October. Martínez was attacked this Thursday night with a machete by her former partner in the municipality of Minas, in Camagüey.
Martínez’s neighbors confirmed to the media Cuban Time that the aggressor was his former life partner, identified as Héctor, an officer of the National Revolutionary Police whose surnames are unknown and who works in this town. After committing the crime, he fled and his whereabouts are still unknown.
Martínez shared a five-year relationship with her alleged killer, but they had separated five months ago. The neighbors assure that the subject arrived at his house around nine at night, when most neighborhoods are left in the dark due to the general blackout.
According to the testimony of the neighbors, who witnessed what happened, Martínez was watching television with a ten-year-old girl, whose relationship was not specified, when the man arrived and attacked her. The uniformed man dealt 25 machetes to the woman, while she yelled at him: “I told you that you had to respect me.”
The victim was taken to the emergency room of a medical care center, but, due to the severity of his injuries, he died hours after admission.
October has been a bloody month for Cuban women with four registered femicides to date, but in the year there are already 31
Mother of two children and grandmother of a baby, Martínez was remembered for her friendships on social networks. “It is a sad day in our town, a person has died because of another who had no right to take his life. No one deserves to die like this,” wrote Leyver Racet Álvarez, in the Facebook group, Locals Forever.
October has been a bloody month for Cuban women with four registered femicides to date, but in the year there are already 31. Most of these cases are reported on independent platforms and are perpetrated by ex-partners of the victims.
The first femicide reported this month came on October 11, when Cuban actor Jesús Rodríguez Vázquez murdered his ex-wife, Nodis Morales, and later hanged himself. The incident occurred in the early hours of Monday, October 3, but the bodies were found three days later.
Just in a week Santiago de Cuba was the scene of two murders. The first, on October 16, Yadira Sueiro Pérez, 22, was attacked by her ex-partner with a machete in the town of Corralón, located in the Santiago municipality of Songo La Maya. Three days later, Eudelvis Leyva Rivera, a 19-year-old mother of a nine-month-old girl, was found dead with several wounds on her body, a victim of rape and her throat slit.
A week later, the Alas Tensas and YoSiTeCreo observatories confirmed the violent death of Lisandra Fernández34, who died at the hands of her husband in the city of Las Tunas.
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