Havana/For weeks, Yanet Martínez Latamblet is living between sadness and discomfort. The worker, along with four other employees, has been convicted of the theft of more than 7,000 chickens of the Poultry Farm Lajita 1, belonging to the Guantanamo poultry company, a crime that emphatically denies and which indicates to the managers of the entity, which were not even taken to trial.
“I want to denounce the rape and harassment that I am having from the maximum direction of my company,” says the woman categorical. Martínez Latamblet has just been sanctioned, after an oral view, on September 25, to a year of house prison for “not preservation of state assets.” In addition to appealing the ruling of the Municipal Court of Guantanamo, he points out as true guilty of the managers of the state entity, located at kilometer 1 of the road to Santiago de Cuba.
“In my situation there are four more colleagues,” lists the worker, who worked on the farm between 2017 and 2024 as a breeder, and only learned that she was being prosecuted on September 7. “We received a summons for a trial for ‘breach of duty’ and when we arrived at the court we learned everything, we had no preparation for that, we did not know everything,” he rivets. That day, however, the oral view was suspended because two prosecuted were missing.
“Everything we had heard until that moment was that the person responsible was the Headquarters,” he says about an event occurred in September 2023 when in “an audit at the company level, the missing 7,000 birds was detected.” After control, the farm workers were summoned to a meeting where they were demanded to pay the amount corresponding to the lost chickens.
The Guantanamo poultry company then crossed a bad moment with several missing and the amount for the 7,000 missing chickens exceeded 100,000 pesos
“They asked us to put the money,” Martínez Latamblet recalls. The Guantanamo poultry company then crossed a bad moment with several missing and the amount for the 7,000 missing chickens exceeded 100,000 pesos, a sum that distributed among the workers remained “unpayable,” says the woman. Given the refusal of employees to deliver these resources, it became impossible to hide the embezzlement.
The financial situation of Lajita 1 has been very precarious in recent decades, the farm was even paralyzed for more than 15 years From 2016 it was reactivated for the production of starting chicks, seeking to supply local poultry needs and avoid the transfer of these birds from other provinces. However, The lack of feed Animal, fuel problems and missing constant significantly reduced its production.
While working on the farm, Martínez Latamblet starred Several complaints about the poor management of resources and the involvement of managers in the theft of chickens. In 2019, according to a report of Cubanethe accused several leaders of the Guantanamo Poultry Company “before the Economic Police for diversion of resources, falsification of documents and bad management and missing.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntaqvzdkot0
At that time, the arrival of a new director, after surprising the previous one, José Roberto Crespo, at a police control point, along with four workers, carrying 14 bags of feed, led to the realization of an audit that left the loss of 5,000 birds and a good part of the animal food. As on this occasion, employees informed the missing monetary but they refused. That negative and the public complaint of Martínez Latamblet brought innumerable reprisals that Guantanamera believes that they are, in part, the root of the current accusation.
As in a cycle that reproduces again and again, the woman has now seen the story be repeated, quite common in official poultry farms that are going through a lousy moment. The fall in production has triggered the price of chicken meat that is marketed at more than 350 pesos pound in the markets and each egg is around 100. Cuba went from producing 2,717 million eggs in 1991 to only 385 million in 2024 And this year’s data could be even worse.
In May 2024, the case against Martínez Latamblet and his colleagues went to the Technical Research Department
In May 2024, the case against Martínez Latamblet and his colleagues passed to the Department of Technical Research (DTI). “We were cited the five defendant workers and we showed the ship cards, the photos we had and all the evidence they asked for, they took the smell traces and a calligraphic sample.” In parallel, the company decided to leave them under a process of labor interruption without salary, a reaction that the woman sees as “a retaliation” for having refused to cover the missing pocket.
Finally, after several labor oscillations, on March 26 of this year all the farm workers went to a “availability” process, the official euphemism for dismissal. “We were left without work and without salary, without the right to claim because they told us that it was an order that had come from the national level.” The chronic diversion of resources of the farm put it in the peephole of the official cuts, from the main company in Havana they assured that the place “had not contributed anything, productively, to the system,” says the woman.
“Following this situation, 95% of the workers decided to complain to all instances, we even went to Havana and left a letter in the central committee.” However, the answer has not yet arrived and Martínez Latamblet is still unemployed and now in house prison. “The true leaders are still there because they are, most, the leaders of the Guantanamo poultry company,” he says without a clipper. “We are paying the innocents.”
