MADRID, Spain.- The observatories of the feminist magazine taut wings and the YoSíTeCreo platform in Cuba warned this Wednesday that “prevention and reparation are the answer to femicides, never punitiveness.”
“As observers who risk our security to register, sensitize, and prevent femicide violence in Cuba, we oppose the use of this cause by PUNITIVE POPULISM,” they said through a statement shared on their social networks.
The statement was in response to the recent note from the Supreme People’s Court of Cuba (TSP), in which the sentences of life imprisonment against two perpetrators of femicides last year on the Island.
“We would like to know if financial compensation was derived from both sentences for the children who survived their mothers, if the affected families have accessed comprehensive psycho-emotional support, just to cite two examples. We would like to know if any of the victims asked for help for the attacks that usually precede the femi (ni) cides and if she received it ”, questioned the platforms that defend women’s rights.
In this sense, they explained that “a harsh sentence can alleviate the pain of the family due to the immediate loss, but it will not repair what that absence will mean in the long term, for example, for grandparents and grandmothers who, often without strength or economic resources, they raise girls and boys who survived the femicide of their mothers. And much less will it prevent other women, children, and adolescents from suffering some type of fem(ni)cide, with serious consequences for their families.”
In their joint statement taut wings and YoSíTeCreo in Cuba reiterated that stopping femicides on the island will only be possible with “comprehensive measures to prevent and address gender violence.”
These measures have been proposed and demanded on numerous occasions from the Cuban regime, which until now has not responded.
For this reason, the feminists consider, “the sentences of perpetual deprivation of liberty to the defendants of cases 366 and 77 of 2022, in the popular provincial courts respectively of Havana and Ciego de Ávila, we understand them as exemplary punishments to evade the obligations of the State of prevention, reparation and guarantee of non-repetition of gender violence”.
Demands of the platforms to the Cuban State
- Classification of the specific crime of femi(ni)cide
- Access to the official figures of murders to be able to determine the real dimension of the femi(ni)cides
- Implementation of comprehensive prevention and care protocols for people affected by gender violence
- Creation of shelters and rescue systems for women and their children in danger
- Comprehensive Law against Gender Violence
- Legalization of activism
- Promote a perspective of justice and reparation
- Specialized and early attention to aggressors
- Gender and feminist approach in public education
Between 2019 and so far in 2023, these Observatories have registered 145 femicides in Cuba.
