The Cuban filmmaker Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti condemned the regime's lack of transparency regarding the death of his daughter Yésica Cremata Martínez, 19 years old, who passed away in January 2022 under circumstances that the family believes remain unclear. He expressed his despair in an interview with Tania Costa for CiberCuba, summarizing it with a devastating phrase: "If in Cuba they don't care about the living, imagine the dead."
The young woman, as the director reported, was apparently healthy and was at her boyfriend's house when she died. "She was 19 years old, she wasn't sick," Cremata emphasized, for whom the loss is even more incomprehensible due to the lack of official answers.
In attempting to obtain information, the filmmaker called the Legal Medicine office in Cuba and encountered a wall of institutional silence. "When I called Legal Medicine, they wouldn't give me the name of the doctor; no one, and what they did tell me was that it was an atypical pneumonia," he stated.
The explanation did not convince him. Cremata pointed out that he found the diagnosis suspicious because it was the term that Cuban authorities used widely during and after the pandemic to avoid officially recording COVID-19 cases. "My daughter was not sick with COVID; this was in the post-COVID years," he clarified, although he admitted he had no evidence that the death was intentional.
According to previous statements from the filmmaker, the authorities also did not allow the cremation of the body nor did they provide the family with a pathological certificate. Furthermore, the official version changed: they first told them that the cause was a heart attack and then altered the diagnosis to "atypical pneumonia." There is no autopsy report or public statement from the Ministry of Public Health clarifying what happened.
The death of Yésica Cremata marked a turning point in the life of her father, filmmaker Juan Carlos Cremata. In March 2023, he confessed that his existence "lost meaning" after her passing, and a month later he went further: "Whatever time I have left, I will dedicate to destroying the Cuban regime."
This tragedy adds to another that marked his childhood: his father, Carlos Alberto Cremata, was a crew member of the Cubana de Aviación flight 455, which was shot down on October 6, 1976, off the coast of Barbados with 73 people on board. The victims are officially referred to in Cuba as "the martyrs of Barbados." Cremata has publicly questioned the official version regarding the authorship of the attack.
The filmmaker, who has been living in Miami since 2016 after being marginalized by the regime following a performance that the authorities interpreted as an offensive reference to Fidel Castro, has been increasingly taking a combative stance against the island's government for years. The play 'SOS Cuba', premiered in September 2022, was his first public tribute to his daughter, Yésica Cremata.
Two family tragedies without satisfactory resolution—his father's in 1976 and his daughter's in 2022—define Cremata's perspective on the Cuban state and its silence regarding those who do not fit into the official narrative.
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