A mother demands justice for the murder of her son in Santiago de Cuba

Denia Fernández Rey once again asked for justice for the murder of her only son, Jesús Alberto Martínez Fernández, five months after the crime. The mother spoke from Miami, where she remains temporarily, in an interview broadcast on Monday, November 9 by Telemundo 51. In June, she had placed images of the young man in different parts of Palma Soriano to demand that the case not go unanswered.

Martínez Fernández, 26, died after being stabbed in the early hours of June 12 near the Galaxy bar, also called El Villar, in Palma Soriano, Santiago de Cuba. According to testimonies collected by communicator Yosmany Mayeta Labrada, the young man tried to intervene in a fight between several boys and received a stab wound. His mother maintained that the attack was initiated by a man who jumped from a balcony and threw himself on him; she said that the stab hit his heart.

Fernández said that during the emergency care there was no ambulance, electricity or blood available for her son. She also pointed out that the police initially resisted handing over the body and that State Security agents intimidated her during the preparations for the funeral. Hundreds of neighbors accompanied the funeral in a motorcade in the rain. Martínez Fernández was a motorcyclist, had a motor shop and had a degree in Geography.

The mother, a former member of the Ladies in White and leader of FLAMUR in Santiago de Cuba, expressed suspicions that the murder could be linked to her son's opposition activity. Opposition organizations identified him as a leader of Impacto Juvenil. The Cuban Women's Network blamed the State for the crime and requested that the facts be clarified. In the public information consulted as of November 9, there was no official version of the motive for the attack, arrests or charges.

The independent records cited show different counts of violent deaths. The Cuban Observatory of Citizen Auditing counted 90 events that it classified as murders between January and June 2026, compared to 63 in the same months of 2025. Santiago de Cuba registered 13, the second highest provincial figure, behind Matanzas, with 18. In that period, the total number of documented crimes fell from 1,319 to 985, while fatalities rose from 69 to 102.

The observatory warned that blackouts and internet interruptions make it difficult to gather reports. Separately, Cubalex documented 37 homicides in July and 52 in August, figures released in early September. The organization indicated that its follow-up depends on the cases it manages to register and verify; in addition, it pointed out that the absence of recent and disaggregated official statistics makes it impossible to accurately measure the scale of violence in Cuba.