SLP, Mexico.- In Las Marías de Palmarito, a rural neighborhood of 112 people located near Gibara, in the province of Holguín, the majority of women residing in that Cuban community They married as minorsas the documentary reveals She nakedscreened this Thursday for the first time on the Island.
The audiovisual, made by Karelis Herrera and Yenny Pérez, focuses on an issue that the Cuban authorities do not usually refer to: child marriage.
In “Las Marías”, of the 63 women who live there, only four were married when they were over 16 years old.
Ella naked (2021) brings together the testimonies of Dayaneira Caridad (17 years old), Vilma Rodríguez (53), Caridad Martínez (48), Yanet Rodríguez (35), Yoandra Cámbara (28) and Aurora Rodríguez (63), who married while they were still minors.
In a space of marginality and with a low level of education, the experiences of these women make visible the context of violence in which they are immersed.
“Since I got married I started doing everything (in the house). I didn’t know how to do anything. “I was a girl,” said one of the interviewees.
Another of the women who offered her story for the documentary, Vilma, revealed that her first husband was 31 years old and she was 14 when they married. She had her first child at 15 years old.
According to what Karelis Herrera expressed to the agency EFEthe idea for the documentary arose when the director realized that child marriage was “almost a tradition” in that town and was “normalized.”
“Everyone understood that it was not a problem if two people fell in love even when they were minors and the worst thing was that in most cases it was with men three times their age,” he said.
In their research for the audiovisual, the creators discovered that it is not a phenomenon exclusive to rural areas, but rather that it extends to many places “and neither informative nor criminal measures are taken to stop this situation.”
That is why with the film they want to “draw the attention of the authorities and the international community to the issue” to protect girls and prevent them from losing their childhoods.
According to UNICEF Cuba, child marriage and early unions are a “violation of rights” and “crushes the hopes, dreams and future of adolescent girls.”
The organization boasts of promoting gender equality with education, protection and social inclusion measures to prevent child marriage and early unions, but the phenomenon continues to appear on the Island, due to the indolence of the authorities.
In 2022, with the approval of the Family Code the recognition and formalization of unions in people under 18 years of age was eliminated; Previously, it was possible in Cuba to get married from the age of 14 for women and 16 for men, which also highlighted the gender gap that exists in Cuban laws.
Although the minimum legal age for marriage on the Island was 18 years, if the two guardians of a woman over 14 years old or a man over 16 years old approved the marriage of the daughter or son, they could get married.
In 2016, a total of 994 girls between the ages of 14 and 18, as well as 95 boys between the ages of 16 and 18, were married in Cuba.
