Battered Women in Cuba - Where Can They Go?

Battered Women in Cuba: Where Can They Go?
Posted: 12/02/2014 5:44 pm EST Updated: 12/02/2014 6:59 pm EST

"Do you know what it feels like to break the wall?" she asked me years
after we met. "It's like someone cracked a table on your face... it
hurts, but you can't believe its your body."

"Now I'm afraid of men, I don't want to have anything to do with them,"
she confessed while we talked in a café with more flies than menu
options. She began to narrate the details of a Calvary she had always
kept hidden, from shame and because she felt responsible for those
blows. Today, she can't hear out of one ear, her nose slants to the left
and she mistrusts all those whose pants have a fly.

Like many provincial women, Ileana landed in Havana on the arm of a man
who promised her "villas and castles," he said. "I was very young and,
since I was a little girl I'd been taught in my house in Banes that I
should serve a man and please him." While she told me her story I had
the impression I was speaking with a woman from the early twentieth
century, but no: Ileana is younger than I am. She wore the school
neckerchief, shouting "Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che," and
studied up to the eleventh grade in a high school in the countryside.

"I came to Havana and for the first weeks he treated me like a queen,"
she said, unable to contain her smile. When Ileana laughs her whole face
lights up and her nose looks more crooked than ever. "Then he started to
mistreat me, but only verbally," she says, downplaying the importance
while looking over her shoulder. A young man had sat down at the table
next to us and was observing us laciviously. "Ladies, did someone stand
you up? Because here is a stallion who never fails," he blurts out,
under the imperturbable gaze of the waiter.

"The neighbors called the police several times. Then we spent hours and
hours at the station at Zanja and Dragones streets, for nothing. The
investigator told me they didn't get involved in things between husband
and wife," and that, "I had to go home with him, because I didn't have
anywhere else to go," she explains, already on the verge of tears. In
Cuba, current law has enormous gaps with regards to gender violence. If
the abuse "is not defined in the Penal Code, the abuser is not
sanctioned," a lawyer at the law firm on Carlos III Street later
explained to me, asking not to be named.

"He could only be charged if a doctor determined I had injuries," Ileana
recalls. However, a black eye or an ache in the side isn't considered
one. "I had to show a wound that was a puncture or bleeding," she
explains. I look at her and question why a doctor would ignore the marks
of cigarette burns on her forearm and her boxer's nose, without
protecting her. What was lacking for a restraining order? That he kill
her? I wondered, without sharing it with her.

Things have calmed down. The abuser is far away and this petite woman
with her battered face confesses, "Well, I have to say, he wasn't so
bad," and immediately adds, "in the tenement where we lived one woman
had a husband who came home drunk from work one day with a machete." She
touches wood and looks around while concluding, "Thanks to the virgin, I
was luckier."

Her case was archived again and again. She had no phone to call from, no
address for a battered women's shelter is published in the official
media, so Ileana endured and remained silent. Her martyrdom lasted for a
decade, including rape within the marriage -- also not defined in our
laws -- the odd fracture, and constant humiliation.

"Then my daughter was born and she made me bold," says this woman
dressed in baggy clothes, looking down, avoiding the eyes of the man
sitting beside us at the café. "One night I gathered everything and went
to my aunt's house." However, the escape didn't last very long. "Someone
ran their mouth and told him where I was staying and he came to find me.
It was the darkest night of my life."

Between pushes and insults, Ileana returned to her husband's house.
"That night he forced me for hours while telling me 'you're mine and no
other man's'." She told how the next day she couldn't even urinate. "I
hurt all over and had his teeth marks all over my back." Then began the
phase of total defeat. "I got used to it, that my life would be like
this, and stopped resisting," she related with a pragmatism that is
still painful.

Shortly afterwards the abuser found "an even younger country girl he
mistreated," recalls Ileana. "I was crushed, I didn't want to look at
myself in the mirror, I didn't put on make up, or go out in the street."
In all that time, no women's organization approached her, she didn't
know of any haven where she could find shelter, and more than a dozen
times she heard the police that responded say, "Well, she must have done
something to piss him off."

Today, Ileana shared with me her wish. "I want to have sex with a man
without fear... romantically." As she says it her right hand touches her
nose, trying to push it to the center... The place where it should have
been if the abuser had not crossed her path.

Source: Battered Women in Cuba: Where Can They Go? | Yoani Sanchez -
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/battered-women-in-cuba-wh_b_6257840.html>