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Violence in Cuba continues unabated. Residents of the town of Chile, in the municipality of San Luis, in Santiago de Cuba, are being harassed by a neighbor named Yaniel Betancourt who, despite his youth, has left several victims with knife wounds without any response from the police, until his latest victim, a 32-year-old man, suffered a machete blow to his hand that severed the tendons.
It happened on December 24, 2024, when a "gathering" organized in the town turned into a brawl. Raúl Montero Bertrán, the latest victim of the mutilator of Santiago de Cuba, was there, but the trouble wasn't with him. Like many others, he ran away from the fight, but then he realized he had left behind a bottle that did not belong to him and returned to retrieve it.
Upon seeing him, the mutilator, in a state of intoxication, drew his machete and struck a blow to one hand, severing the tendons of four of his five fingers. After this tragedy, the police did not show up at the scene, and the criminal "stayed at home as if nothing had happened," until he was finally arrested.
Meanwhile, Raúl Montero Bertrán has remained hospitalized in Santiago de Cuba, where he has had to undergo surgery twice and is currently awaiting a third operation.
No one from the town has reported anything on social media, even though several witnesses saw the massacre. The state-run press has said even less. If news of this tragic event has emerged today, it is because a relative of the last victim, who lives in Havana, found the courage to speak out. "I am outraged by the police in this country," she said in an email to CiberCuba.
"This same boy is used to this because he has had several injuries right there nearby and they don't do anything about it," this person added in statements to this portal.
More and more Cuban families are denouncing the impunity with which murderers, criminals, and drug traffickers roam freely on the island, while innocents like Mayelín Rodríguez Prado are sentenced to 15 years in prison for recording protests in Nuevitas (Camagüey).
Injustices can also be seen, such as that of a neighbor from Aguacate, in Palma Soriano, who was fined and imprisoned for denouncing that three violent murders had occurred in his town in less than a year. Ultimately, due to media pressure, he was released.
The state media only reports on crimes on rare occasions, and usually when it is no longer possible to conceal what has happened, as was the case with the multiple murder in Ceballos, which resulted in the deaths of two mothers along with their two children, in August 2024.
In contrast, nothing is published about gender violence or the crimes that occurred last New Year's Eve, when at least two young people lost their lives in Cuba. One of them, in Santiago de Cuba, after a dispute over a phone and the other, in Colón, Matanzas, in a settling of accounts, which claimed the life of a family man in front of his wife and three-year-old daughter.
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