Several videos have been circulating on social networks since Saturday that show a teenager shot by the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) in the El Condado district, in Santa Clara. The minor, 17 years old, was identified by some users as Zidan Batista Álvarez.
In the videos, a crowd of residents of El Condado surrounds a group of police officers and several patrol cars, in the vicinity of Estrada Palma street, the main artery of the district. The recording records four officers around an individual (presumably Batista Álvarez) handcuffed face down on the street.
One of the police officers grabs a gun and kicks him, while the young man writhes with a bleeding wound on his thigh or abdomen (the poor quality of the images does not allow it to be located exactly).
Another video shows how one of the passers-by goes to pick up the wounded man while an officer prevents him from doing so, hitting him with the tonfa. “A shot, a shot… I couldn’t record the shots, asere… full of blood,” says the person who records the scene with his phone. “Murderer… a policeman fired three blanks into the air and then shot a child,” says one of the women who witnessed the incident.
Although there is no official confirmation of the death of Zidan Batista Álvarez, several users related to him have expressed themselves in this regard on social networks.
“Fly high, Zidan, may God have you in his holy glory,” Yeris González, a worker at the Fructuoso Rodríguez Basic Secondary School in Santa Clara, wrote on Facebook. “They took your life when you were so young […] my condolences to his family and friends,” he added. According to Batista Álvarez’s Facebook profile, he and his partner, Susleidy Guerra, were the parents of a little girl.
One version of the events states that the police had gone to the scene due to a fight between the illegal occupants of a property and its owners, in which another unidentified person also died, the victim of a machete wound. Batista Álvarez would have been shot at some point during this same altercation, after the officers fired several warning shots into the air.
This is stated by the official Facebook group Followers of the Cuban Legionnaire: “The anti-Cuban media are already beginning to manipulate what happened in the fight in Santa Clara County. As you can see in the recording and in other videos, they are not seen in any case the circumstances in which the police shot was fired”.
“It sounds good in one of the videos, how they say the three persuasive shots were fired [sic, en lugar de disuasorios], and the subject continued on top of the police with the machete. Shots were fired and one was wounded in the left leg, the injured are out of danger. The deceased was a 17-year-old boy who received several wounds with a knife in the heat of the anger. The police only came to prevent more deaths, they acted responsibly,” the publication states.
Although this profile does not constitute an official version of the events, and no newspaper or local media has offered any report, the publication of Followers of the Cuban Legionnaire allows us to deduce the path that the authorities will follow to explain the incident.
There is very little clarity about the facts and no reliable source has spoken about the death of Zidan Batista Álvarez or other individuals, nor have they justified the presence of the PNR officers in that area and the reason why they came to shoot .
The County, where the feared Fifth Unit of the PNR in Santa Clara is located, is a neighborhood characterized both by crime and by the large number of police forces and State Security.
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