A 70-year-old man beat his ex-wife to death and then tried to burn her in the La Salud neighborhood, in the municipality of Quivicán, Mayabeque province. This is the second femicide that has occurred in Cuba during the month of September and adds to the more than twenty cases throughout 2022.
The victim was identified as Odalia Jorge González, also 70 years old, who lived in a two-story building, located near the La Salud polyclinic, in Quivicán. Neighbors confirmed that her ex-partner, Elio González, beat the woman to death around 7:30 a.m. last Friday.
A witness to the femicide, Odaymis López, told the newspaper CubaNet that the man, after killing her, lit a candle to burn the body. “The neighbors quickly got a fire extinguisher from a truck that was parked in the area and they put out the fire, but the woman was already dead,” López said.
Two weeks before this femicide, on September 9, the nurse Zoila Chacón was also murdered by her husband and left two minors orphaned. Chacón had been working at the Eusebio Hernández Maternal and Child Hospital since last April, after moving from Guantánamo to Havana to join the nursing and obstetrics team.
Sexist violence has claimed at least 26 victims so far this year, in addition to seven other frustrated assassination attempts
According to statistics kept by the independent organization Yo SíTeCreo in Cuba, sexist violence has claimed at least 26 victims so far this year, in addition to seven other frustrated assassination attempts.
The platform, which warns of the underreporting of its data, has warned on numerous occasions of the need to create an official census to detect the seriousness of the problem. In the three years since its foundation, the group has not stopped demanding a comprehensive law that guarantees the prevention of this type of violence and the protection of its victims.
Cuba does not publish figures on sexist violence and the most recent data on this issue is from a 2016 National Survey on Gender Equality, in which 10,698 women were questioned.
This survey indicates that 26.7% of Cuban women between the ages of 15 and 74 claimed to have suffered some type of violence in their partner relationship in the twelve months prior to the study and that only 3.7% of attacked asked for institutional help.
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