Carlos Estenos, a young resident of the province of Camagüey, was found dead in a rural area hours after friends and family began sharing his photo on social media, seeking information about his whereabouts, according to a post from the platform 'NiO Reportando Un Crimen'.
The information, described as preliminary by the source itself, indicates that the body was found bound and burned. No Cuban authority has officially confirmed the circumstances of the discovery or reported the initiation of an investigation.
According to testimonies gathered by the communicator Niover Licea for his page, the possible motive for the crime may have been the theft of money and horses, although the platform 'NiO Reporting a Crime' warns that “these elements are preliminary and there is still no official confirmation regarding the exact circumstances of the crime or its perpetrators”.
Carlos had been reported missing the day before his body was found. People close to him began circulating his image on social media in the hope of obtaining any clues about his whereabouts, unaware of the outcome that would be revealed hours later.
A source close to the family, who requested to remain anonymous, stated that their loved ones "are devastated."
The case is not an isolated incident. According to the same platform, approximately two weeks earlier, another farmer was murdered on a farm in the municipality of Florida, also in Camagüey, in an event that similarly did not receive a public response from the authorities.
The pattern repeats throughout the island. In July 2026, the farmer Antonio Yemén was found dead on his farm in Guantánamo, bound with barbed wire, beaten, and strangled, following an alleged assault to steal his livestock.
In May of that same year, Osvaldo Carbonel was murdered in Santiago de Cuba while trying to retrieve his stolen oxen. And in January, Onofre Amable Arrojo died beaten, gagged, and hanged on his farm in Quivicán, Mayabeque.
In Camagüey, the murder of young Pedro Armando Junco Torres was also reported in May 2026. He was killed with a sharp weapon and had 46 confirmed bruises according to the forensic examination, although in that case, five people were arrested within 24 hours following the incident.
Cuban authorities do not publish official crime statistics, making it difficult to accurately gauge the extent of the phenomenon.
The Cuban Observatory of Citizen Audit (OCAC) recorded 721 reports of thefts in rural areas during 2025 and 193 thefts related to the theft and slaughter of livestock in just the first half of that year. Independent media and monitoring organizations attribute the rise in rural violence to the economic crisis, extreme scarcity, and the weakening of state control in the Cuban countryside.
Finally, the communicator Niover Licea called on anyone with information about the case: "Silence cannot become protection for those who commit these acts. A family has just lost a loved one and deserves to know the truth and for justice to be served."
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