MIAMI, United States.- Arletty Reyes Batista, a 24-year-old Cuban girl, was allegedly murdered by a man who gave her a “bottle” (hitchhiking) in the early hours of the morning, CiberCuba reported this Saturday. Her murder becomes the 17th femicide in the country so far this year.
The body of Arletty, mother of a four-year-old girl, was found on the outskirts of the town of San Germán, Holguín province, on Monday, June 27. The young woman had been reported missing since Saturday the 25th, when she left her house with the aim of reaching the University of Holguín.
According to the CiberCuba source, the alleged murderer is “a neighbor who gave her a bottle at dawn when she was leaving the field where she lived to go to university. He was incarnated with her.”
The man, approximately 60 years old, could have killed her, said a friend of the victim, because in December “he offered her money to be with her and she did not want to.” Supposedly the aggressor “she confessed everything; he said how he killed her,” he added.
Arletty lived in the rural neighborhood “La Blade” in San Germán, the head town of the Urbano Noris municipality, and traveled from there to the provincial capital, about 38 kilometers away, bound for the University.
Arletty’s murder is added to the 16 victims of femicides in Cuba in the first six months of the year. The last two reported last week: that of Daniela Hernández, on June 25, murdered at the hands of her ex-partner and father of her two children; and that of Tania González, on the night of June 27, at the hands of her partner and in front of her daughter and her grandchildren.
The feminist platforms Yo SíTeCreo en Cuba and Alas Tensas have denounced over and over again that “every day that passes in Cuba without an appropriate system to deal with gender-based violence turns the Cuban State and society into FEMINICIDES, because they do not act, because they do not protect nor do they create the essential mechanisms for women at risk of femicide.”
The 17 femicides in Cuba to date “are alarming figures, figures that are worrying. And what also worries us the most is that there is no political will on the part of the State to talk about the cases. We continue without a gender law on the island,” said activist Marthadela Tamayo, a member of the Cuban Women’s Network.
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