It has been 45 days since the laughter of Yeniset Rojas Pérez has not echoed within the walls of her house in Ranchuelo in Villa Clara. The 33-year-old woman disappeared, in broad daylight, on March 18 while she was returning from her work and, since then, her anguish has taken over her family and friends.
Yerandy Fleites, playwright and brother of Rojas, describes as “devastating” the impact that the woman’s absence has had on her loved ones. “She is a person with a simple life, divorced, dedicated to raising her 10-year-old girl and caring for our mother who has major health problems,” he details.
At the time of her disappearance, Rojas was working as an administrator at the Ranchuelo pre-university school. The last time she was seen was that Friday around 11 in the morning when she was returning from the educational center to her home, a route that runs through “an overcrowded area, full of interaction, traffic.”
When the hours began to pass and Rojas did not come home, the family knew immediately that something had happened. “We tried to file the complaint with the police on Friday the 18th, but according to the protocols, we had to wait 24 hours, so it had to be done on Saturday the 19th.”
“I find it unbelievable that we have disappeared in Cuba and that no mass media echoes the news”
Fleites classifies the treatment they received from the police from the beginning of the investigation as good, but criticizes the authorities who have not supported them in the hard time they are experiencing. “There has not been a vaunted ‘social worker’ assisting this family, there has been nothing at all,” he notes.
Rojas was the fundamental pillar of her home, “a true warrior of life,” explains her brother, who assures that the woman’s absence is “a nightmare that seems to have no end.” The playwright criticizes the official indifference towards the case: “We feel that apathy, we have felt it, it feels.”
“I find it unbelievable that we have disappeared in Cuba and that no mass media echoes the news,” Fleites wrote on his Facebook account when 19 days passed without having a certificate of life for his sister. Since then, she has maintained the claim on social networks for Rojas’ disappearance to be broadcast in the national media.
“I fear that the silence, this silence right now, this silence that accumulates dangerously, extends over ‘the case’ and begins to be forgotten,” he wrote then and now reiterates: “we are doing what they have been unable to make the media and the official press”.
In contrast, the solidarity of the neighbors has been present all the time. “The town, the neighborhood, the family, the friends, formed several parties and we searched for it for several days (at any time) around the town. The human support, that support has been fundamental and it is the thing that gives us the most strength.” in the world. We have had at our disposal from a car, through a machete, to the pill that today does not even exist in spiritual centers”.
The playwright criticizes the official indifference towards the case: “We feel that apathy, we have felt it, it feels”
Although the police investigation continues, Fleites fears that a lot of time has been wasted and that “from the beginning, more could be done, much more, starting by making the case visible as a matter of Cuba, not of Ranchuelo, and that this would perhaps allow function of research methods, techniques, resources, intelligence, etc.
Rojas’s mother and father they receive little information about the course of the investigation: “they are hardly taken into account, a week goes by and no one goes” from the police to update the relatives about the process. Without new data, the anguish grows, but Fleites clings to hope.
“I refuse and I will refuse to talk about her in the past tense,” he points out and on his Facebook wall the playwright has published several photos of a girl with a mischievous face hugging her brother. In the most recent one, Yeniset Rojas Pérez, already an adult, looks directly at the camera and smiles. “She is not alone,” she reads herself next to the image.
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