What to Do When the Cuban Police Do Nothing?
HAVANA TIMES – Claudia Rafaela Ortiz and Yamila Zayas Toledo never met. And they probably never would have, even in the hypothetical case that Yamila had not been murdered on September 26 by the very man she had reported to the police station in the Matanzas municipality of Jagüey Grande just 24 hours earlier.
But the officers who attended to her took no measures to protect her, and Yamila ended up being murdered in front of her young daughter. For Cuban feminist platforms, it was the 33rd recorded femicide on the Island since the beginning of 2025, and for much of public opinion, yet another confirmation of the police’s ineffectiveness.
In recent years, complaints against the Ministry of the Interior, particularly the National Revolutionary Police (PNR), have become common, due to their inability or disinterest in containing the wave of violence plaguing the country. In the absence of official channels to address citizen grievances, social media has become the space where many seek help or at least a way to vent.
Halfway between both circumstances was probably where Claudia found herself when, on the night of September 22, she published a long post on Facebook recounting how the police had refused to accept her complaint at a Havana station. She and a friend had intervened to stop a man from beating his partner in the middle of the street, only to be attacked themselves. Hours later, the aggressor returned with a knife and several accomplices to threaten them and threw glass bottles at her home. Yet at the station, the officers refused to even file the complaint. The captain in charge insisted that only the beaten woman could press charges.
Had Claudia been just another girl, her complaint might have caused little more than a brief stir on social media and a couple of pieces in the independent press, without any concrete effect on the issue. But unfortunately for the abuser and the officers involved, the complainant was not only the director of Alma Mater (the magazine of Cuban university students), but also one of the young women often showcased by pro-government media as an example of leftist militancy.
In October 2024, Claudia had gained notoriety by coordinating a broad relief effort for victims of Hurricane Oscar, which devastated her native Guantanamo province. Two months later, she was featured in a special national television report highlighting young women committed to building their lives in Cuba.
That is why, shortly after her post appeared, it already had hundreds of supportive comments and had been shared by the leading pro-government influencers. The following morning, she was summoned back to the same police station, where she was offered apologies and her complaint was processed. The aggressor was arrested.
“They took my statement to file a complaint based on knowledge of the fact, regarding the injuries against the young woman committed by her partner, with the aggravating factor of gender violence. It was indeed possible to do so,” Claudia wrote in a new post urging others not to remain silent in the face of such crimes. “Reporting is a duty. It’s a rocky, uncomfortable road, but not impassable. We must persist until we achieve a quick, efficient, and specialized response, like the one we managed, luckily, today,” she insisted.
Yes, There Are Cases Where the Police Are “Efficient”
While common crimes multiply under police inaction, political dissent remains tightly controlled. Opposition activists like Yamila Lafita (known as “Lara Croft” on Facebook) periodically denounce surveillance operations set up outside their homes whenever the authorities decide, for various reasons, to prevent them from going out or receiving visitors. Any of these operations involve at least one patrol car and several officers on motorcycles.
The deployment can be much larger if circumstances demand it. The day after protests in Gibara on September 13, dozens of special forces officers from the Ministry of the Interior were sent to that small coastal city in Holguín province. “With what they spent transporting them, they could just as well have brought water or used the fuel for the generators,” quipped one internet user in a Facebook buy-and-sell group made up of Gibara residents. The protests had been triggered precisely by the shortages of water and electricity.
No Reforms, No Greater Police Presence
In April 2023, the digital magazine El Toque (later republished in Havana Times) reported the story of Ismael Lorenzo, a farmer from the Cienfuegos municipality of Cumanayagua who was planning to give up cattle raising due to increasing thefts and the Police inaction.
Months earlier, a pair of oxen had been stolen from his yard, and it took two days for the police to visit. Later, after losing another animal, the delay was three days, and the officers barely got out of their patrol car. “Before, the police would come to the theft site and take photos, but it seems they got tired and don’t even do that anymore. People don’t report thefts in their fields because they say, ‘What for?’ They don’t even ask if you suspect anyone. Only cattle theft is reported because it’s mandatory,” he said.
Two years later, the situation is much worse. In June, the so-called Working Group for the Prevention and Confrontation of Crime, Corruption, Illegalities, and Social Indiscipline—attached to the Council of Ministers—confirmed an increase in livestock theft and slaughter. It revealed that in a survey of 900 farmers and cooperative members nationwide, respondents identified crime as their main problem, even ahead of high input prices and state nonpayment. What most alarmed the report’s authors, however, was that among the population “there is no rejection of this crime.”
Taking advantage of the PNR’s increasingly sporadic presence in rural areas, livestock-rustling gangs have organized. One of the largest and most active, operating in the Holguín municipalities of Cacocum, Cueto, and Urbano Noris, was dismantled in mid-September in a police operation that ended with a dozen arrests and the recovery of more than 20 horses and other livestock.
For months, the criminals had acted with almost total impunity, emboldened to the point of taking hostages at the cooperative guards’ post during their last robbery. The guards of a farm in Contramaestre, Santiago de Cuba, were far less fortunate when, in early August, they were attacked by a gang that stole a herd of goats: one guard was killed on the spot, while the other was so badly injured the assailants left him for dead.
“Before, if you heard the dogs barking, you’d go out and shout a couple of times, and the thieves would run. Now it’s not like that. I myself have been pelted with stones, and a neighbor was nearly killed with a shotgun blast. It’s no wonder people are giving up cattle raising or keeping only the few animals they can house close to home. Bringing it up with [the Ministry of] Agriculture or the police is pointless. At the ANAP congress assemblies [the National Association of Small Farmers], several delegates complained, and in the end, the blame was practically laid on them. They were told they needed to form ‘more watch groups.’ As if the police had no responsibility and it all depended on us,” complained Orelvis Cañete, a cattle rancher from Camalote in the Camagüey municipality of Nuevitas.
It was in that very community, in February 2023, that a machete-wielding man murdered a 17-year-old girl in front of the police station—a girl with whom he had recently ended a relationship. The crime shocked the nation and underscored the need for a deep reform of police protocols. Some thought changes would come, but more than two years later the PNR remains as ineffective as ever.