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Sheila Pérez didn’t always weigh 181 kilos and her ex-partner wasn’t always an abuser. An offering is built gradually, like a carved wooden effigy or a rosary. And also a perpetrator. Sheila Pérez isn’t dead, but she could be. When they met in 2011, Raidel Calvos, a 40-year-old Cuban, was an attentive man who was willing to help Pérez with his loving daughter until he wasn’t. The first was to isolate Pérez, distancing her from friends, banning her from going out after seven in the evening, completely fencing the house and keeping her away from the family. “He left me alone, but alone, alone, alone,” Pérez tells me.
Then the beatings began. They started on her face as a sort of concession to her pregnancy. He banned doctor’s visits that did not take place in his presence. When Pérez was 39 weeks pregnant, the manager of the neighboring winery hid her in a warehouse after she fled her home in the midst of a beating. That was the day of his first complaint to the police station of the municipality of Cotorro in Havana, the same place where the contractions began, the pain, the sweating, the fear, the screams, oh yes, because his second daughter was on the way, the one was born that day in the ward of a hospital in Havana, where Calvos arrived and shouted at the whole family until he left Pérez alone in the company of him, the doctors and other painful and happy mothers. Then there would be another pregnancy, which Pérez did not want, but Calvos never allowed her to go to the doctor for an abortion. Over time another was born, the fourth of the daughters.
The blows were from the face to the body, and the threats were not the same either. “I know you want to leave me, but you won’t leave me until I don’t want you to, and since I don’t want you to, you’ll die with me,” he warned him at the beginning. “He told me I was dirty, disgusting, a whore, that I was no good, that I had to kiss wherever he went.”
Sometimes he would put his hand on her shoulder and give her advice: “Be good so nothing happens to you.” Then the death threats began: “He said if I left him he would kill me because I would either be with him or dead,” says Pérez. “He said no one could enter the house because he would ruin everything.”
On August 6, Calvos’ behavior so frightened Pérez that he eventually reported him to the police station for threats and harassment. “He told the girls he would kill them, he would kill me and then he would sit there covered in blood and wait for the police to come and he would hang himself.”
Sheila stopped getting her hair and nails done, she gained weight, she stopped attending family gatherings, she stopped talking to neighbors, she barely had any clothes or shoes to wear. Calvos never allowed him to work. Pérez once lost her chicken ration at the supermarket because she was afraid to go out alone. Calvos told her that she was an old woman and Pérez, now 34, believed him. He told her that she was fat and Pérez believed him. He told her she was ugly and Pérez inevitably believed him. “I became so submissive because I didn’t want my daughters to see this misfortune and conflict. He would insult me or hit me and I would remain silent. I learned to swallow everything,” he says. “I couldn’t take it anymore, to the point that I said it would be better for me to kill myself than to live like this.”
Pérez is still alive to report, but she may be dead. A wave of feminicide deaths scares Cuba. According to the Alas Tensas Gender Observatory, which is dedicated to independently recording femicides on the island, there are 62 victims this year, 26 more than in 2021 and 2022, and a shocking number in a country with a population four times smaller than, for example, Spain, where 49 femicides were reported last year.
Although isolation during the coronavirus crisis has led to an increase in gender-related deaths in many countries, it is difficult to measure whether Cuba has seen a recent increase in femicide, a crime that is not criminalized in Cuba is classified. For years the government has remained silent in the face of these crimes. Since 2019, civil society has begun to independently confirm and record femicide deaths. Although the government sometimes denies the existence of femicides in the country, conceals cases, conceals people, or persecutes the work of activists or civil society members, deaths of this kind make headlines in the non-governmental press every month.
Activists agree that many of the femicides reported in Cuba involve women who managed to break the cycle of violence and separate from their partners. However, they have not found professional advice or support networks sufficient to prevent death. A devastating orphanage falls on the bodies of Cuban women. This year, more than 60 people have died at the hands of men for gender-related reasons. How many more will we accumulate? What will the government do that it hasn’t done so far? And who is really killing us at this point? The phallic and uninformed Cuban state is killing us too.
Pérez told me that he wants to leave his house and that he can’t stand living in this room anymore. He broke the lock on the front door so Calvos couldn’t open it, and put two padlocks, two deadbolts on the kitchen door, another padlock on the patio and another on the patio door. When Pérez decided to make a public complaint on social media in mid-September because her ex-partner had threatened her with a machete and was constantly watching her, the police arrested Calvos and she has been in prison ever since. On previous occasions he has been arrested and then released with a fine or a warning.
If Calvos is released tomorrow, there will be no network of shelters across the country that can help Pérez. Nobody will turn to him. The state is not setting up shelters as required by a comprehensive law against gender-based violence in the country, Cuban activists claim. It also does not warn against enforced disappearances of women, there are no prevention programs in schools, nor is there a penal code that classifies femicide as a crime rather than another death due to gender-based violence.
Pérez hopes her ex-husband will not be released. But if they let him go this time and Calvos enters the house again, he knows he could kill them. “This beast will come and kill me,” he says. “He’ll kill me there.”
These are our recommended articles of the week:
The Norwegian committee recognizes the “Women, Life and Freedom” movement that emerged in Iran to defend women’s rights and freedoms after the death of Mahsa Yina Amini in 2022.
The two scientists awarded the Nobel Prize are Katalin Karikó for Covid vaccines and Anne L’Huillier for a keen insight into the interior of the atom. Something is moving in Stockholm.
According to an IMCO study, the gender gap in Mexico’s economy is wider not only in rich countries but also in Latin American countries such as Colombia, Brazil and Chile.
In a world that harbors dystopian fears of technology and artificial intelligence, the creator of the first exoskeleton for children offers hope.
We analyze with its protagonists how and why a song, a tweet or a phrase used in a certain moment can become slogans that make history.
The author of Women Who Fuck spent more than 300 hours listening to 86 women in their 40s to find out how they lived and lived in relationships. She found happiness, love and orgasms, but also insecurity, trauma and violence.
The American doesn’t repeat her Biles II jump, surpassing Rebeca Andrade and tying Kohei Uchimura’s record of six all-around titles. Andrade, second, and Shilese Jones, third.
And one more suggestion at the end:
📚 🇩🇴 Twelve meetings and one farewell, by Sorayda Peguero. By Noor Mahtani
There are many ways to express the nostalgia of an expat. Sorayda Peguero Isaac (Haina, Dominican Republic) says it when she admits that her body is in Catalonia but her heart is full of the sea. Or when he tries to recreate the garden in the courtyard of his house on his small terrace in Sabadell. When it comes to bougainvilleas, tradescantias and begonias. Even when he tells how he secretly smuggles oregano through customs or when he remembers his shell collection, his treasures.
Peguero’s eyes always strive for beauty. “I cling to them to resist. It doesn’t make the pain or sadness go away, but it helps. “Focusing on the beautiful is a task that takes time but is healing,” he says. Twelve Encounters and a Farewell (Frailejón Editores, 2023) is a beautiful book about heritage, roots, light and vegetation, written to be read aloud. “I never use gloves to plant my flowers. I don’t want to deprive myself of the pleasure that I began to feel with my eyes as I watched my father in this place. Sometimes I felt a strong urge to eat dirt. Sometimes I did […] “I felt a deep need to find out what the inside of life tastes like,” says one of his stories. The other twelve stories wander through fantasy and non-fiction, warming anyone far from home.
Carla Gloria Colome (Havana, 1990) is a journalist. He was a co-founder of the independent Cuban magazine El Estornudo. His texts have appeared in El País, Vice, Univision, Letras Libres, Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. She holds a degree in journalism from the University of Havana, a master’s degree in communications from UNAM, and is currently a master’s student in the bilingual journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY, in New York.
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