Neighbors from the Previsora neighborhood in Camagüey managed to apprehend one of two individuals they found inside the yard of a house early this Saturday, around 3:00 am, according to a video shared on Facebook by independent journalist José Luis Tan Estrada.
The second subject ran away before he could be apprehended.
The incident occurred on 15th Street, near the Architect's pool, an area residential to the east of the city.
Residents claim that they immediately called the police, but the officers never showed up, leaving the neighbors alone with the detainee in the middle of the night.
The scene repeats with a frequency that is no longer surprising: it is the citizens themselves who capture, detain, and safeguard the alleged criminals because the authorities do not act.
In July, residents of the same city caught a man who was jumping from rooftop to rooftop to steal solar panels. In May, a suspected thief ended up tied up by residents of the Modelo neighborhood of Camagüey.
Police inaction is not an exception; it is the norm. In Santiago de Cuba, a family waited for more than 10 hours without a response following a robbery in their apartment.
In another documented case, the police took three days to respond after the theft of a portable power station from an elderly woman. This same week, a resident of Matanzas reported an increase in thefts in the town of Bolondrón.
The figures confirm the rise in insecurity in the country.
The Cuban Observatory of Citizen Auditing documented 2,833 verified crimes in 2025, an increase of 115% compared to 2024 and 337% compared to 2023. The number of thefts alone totaled 1,536 cases that year, a rise of 479% since 2023.
The organization Cubalex stated that July 2026 was the most violent month since it began its monitoring, with 168 violent incidents and 37 documented homicides in a single month.
"The violence and insecurity continue to rise in Cuba despite the increasing militarization of the country," warned Cubalex in its August report. The organization has recorded 2,932 incidents of violence and insecurity since 2023, including 736 homicides.
Analysts and independent media attribute the collapse of public security to the economic crisis, the desertion of members of the PNR—estimated at around 20% of the force in the last two years—and the priority the regime places on political control over citizen protection.
The official response has largely been media operations with public displays of detainees in Havana, without addressing the structural causes or effectively reinforcing the police force.
While the regime stages scenes for the cameras, it is the residents of Camagüey—and all of Cuba—who face alone, in the dark of dawn, a wave of crime that the State neither can nor seems willing to contain.
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