LAS TUNAS, Cuba. — In its campaign to try to make the State institutions no longer credible presentable, the official press, as the armed wing of the totalitarian regime that it is, in the same way that it makes apologies for agriculture, industry or national culture, now praises of a police efficiency that in Cuba is the exception and not the rule.
“Police return stolen electric bike to owner,” reads a newspaper headline Havana Tribune dated this June 1st. It turns out that, according to that police success story told by the official media —which says nothing about unsolved crimes—, in less than four hours after filing the complaint, Dr. Roger, a surgeon from the “Joaquín Albarrán” surgical clinical hospital , received the good news that the electric bicycle stolen from his home had been seized by the police, which was returned to its owner by the authorities, photograph by.
According to the doctor, who “felt pain and desperation” —if I know!— for having lost his means of transportation, “his greatest happiness is that events like this do not go unpunished.” Well, listen to me, Dr. Roger is a lucky man. Every day in Cuba are stolen dozens of properties, people who lose bicycles, cows, horses, telephones, electrical appliances, money, jewelry and an extensive list of goods that are almost never recovered, because today police operations in the Cuban archipelago are very low. And, this, when crime is increasing, not only as a consequence of causes and conditions of a socioeconomic nature, but also, due to the low rate of clarification of the crimes produced, because, as is well known, the best prophylaxis against crime It is the clarification of the crimes produced.
Impunity is making crime jump to tragicomic heights. For example, the theft of a horse from the corral in a sugarcane cooperative last week, in which, to steal the animal, the thieves tied up and knocked over the horse, making it lie down between the corral walls. It seems as if, as police competitiveness declines, criminal talent increases.
And I say that I know the “pain and desperation” that this doctor felt when his bicycle was stolen, because last Sunday, May 21, mine was stolen, which was not electric, but a modest common bicycle, although, yes, With new wheels and saddle. And on top of it, a group of tools and objects were also stolen, valuable for their usefulness, very difficult to acquire in Cuba, because they simply cannot be found in the markets.
It is valid to say that although I filed the complaint at the Puerto Padre police station, and not only described the stolen objects in the attached statement, but also provided the case investigator with photographs of the stolen objects, as well as hypotheses of the alleged perpetrators of the crime, I still don’t have the luck of Dr. Roger.
In Cuba, police and thieves continue in an eternal struggle, and in my case and in the case of thousands of people who are victims of robbery like me, the arm of the police is against the ground and the fist of the thieves is raised.
