The journalist denounced that the aggressor hit her partner in front of neighbors and threatened with a white weapon; Zanja station agents refused to process the complaint.
Madrid, Spain.- The official journalist Claudia Rafaela Ortiz denounced this Sunday on her Facebook profile that agents of the Zanja Police Station, in Havana, refused to admit a complaint for gender violence After witnessing an aggression in your neighborhood.
As he said, a man hit his partner in the stomach “several times on the floor” in front of neighbors. Ortiz said that a friend of his, who tried to defend the woman, was injured, and that minutes later the aggressor returned with a white weapon to threaten those present.
The communicator also denounced that the man launched glass bottles against the facade and the balcony of her home, and that the police authorities refused to process her complaint.
“The guard officer and the station captain tell me that the victim (his partner) is the one who must denounce the aggression. And not me. It is not so,” Ortiz wrote, describing that answer as a “clear violation of the Criminal Code.”
The journalist questioned the absence in Cuba of a support system for women at risk of femicide, as well as the lack of shelters and specific legislation.
“There are no shelters, there is no structured support system, there is no urgent political will to help thousands of women at risk of dying in the hands of their partners. Comprehensive law against gender violence now!” He claimed.
In its publication, Ortiz demanded training for professionals who face cases of sexist violence and criticized the lack of legislative advances in the country:
“Should we get the right to life and safety by force? We have been discussion shit for years. And we do not advance or pinga. They kill us, kill them,” he concluded.
The case exposes the criticisms of activists and specialists on the absence in Cuba of an integral law against gender violence.
Feminist activists have repeatedly alerted about the absence in Cuba of effective institutional protocols, shelters for women at risk and specific legal tools that allow preventing femicides. Despite the official speeches about “zero tolerance”, macho violence continues to charge lives on the island without still an integral law against gender violence.
Since 2019, the Winging Genus Observatory (OGAT) and the I believe in Cuba platform have verified more than 270 femicides, despite operating in a hostile environment characterized by the criminalization of feminist activism, restricted access to institutional sources and the absence of a legal typification of feminicide. Only in 2024 they documented 55 cases, and so far this 2025 already add up to more than 30.
While the authorities use expressions such as “murder for gender reasons” or “extreme gender violence”, independent groups insist on the need to name the problem as feminicide and demand the creation of public registration protocols, as well as the approval of an integral law against gender violence.
The lack of systematic official statistics, with detailed methodology and disaggregated public access data, remains an obstacle to dimensioning the true magnitude of the phenomenon in Cuba.
