Havana/Lisney Cárdenas Bruzón wanted to live. He repeated it, according to the testimonies collected in La Tomatera, while the neighbors tried to contain his wounds with the few resources they had at hand. She was 26 years old, had two small children, and had been brutally attacked on the afternoon of June 3, allegedly by her husband, Jorge Vázquez Hernández, from whom she was in the process of separating. He died the following morning, after more than eight hours of agony.
The crime occurred in La Tomatera, a rural community in the Camagüey municipality of Florida, where Lisney went to the alleged attacker’s house after he called her to “talk,” according to reported this Saturday the Alas Tensas Gender Observatory. There she was violently attacked. One of his children, a boy of about three years old, reportedly witnessed the attack. The young woman also leaves behind a daughter of around eight years old.
In La Tomatera, Lisney’s death has left a mixture of pain, anger and helplessness. Neighbors and acquaintances describe her as a beloved girl, a young mother, with a life still ahead of her. His murder doesn’t just hit one family. It also exposes, once again, the defenselessness of many Cuban women in the face of violent partners or ex-partners and the loneliness they are left with when the State does not offer effective protection mechanisms.
The sources consulted by the observatory assure that the local office had been without a stable family doctor for more than a year.
According to verifications carried out by Alas Tensas, the attack occurred on Wednesday afternoon. Then a desperate race to save her began. But in La Tomatera, as in so many rural towns in Cuba, help does not arrive immediately. The blackouts complicated communications and one person had to travel by motorcycle to Florida (about 25 kilometers away) to request help. Meanwhile, the neighbors did what they could.
The sources consulted by the observatory assure that the local office had been without a stable family doctor for more than a year. The ambulance, according to these testimonies, took several hours to arrive. During that time, Lisney remained alive, aware of her children and clinging to the possibility of survival.
With this crime, 14ymedio counts 26 deaths due to sexist violence in Cuba so far in 2026. Alas Tensas, for its part, reports 30 femicides so far this year, in addition to 19 attempted feminicides and one murder of a man for gender reasons. The figure almost doubles the 16 cases verified by the organization itself on the same date the previous year.
The inhabitants of La Tomatera fought to save Lisney with the little they had
In Lisney’s case, that burden now falls on two children. An eight-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy will grow up without their mother. The minor, according to the testimonies collected, would have seen the attack. Alas Tensas recommended specialized psychological care and comprehensive support for the victim’s children and relatives, a demand that rarely finds an institutional response on the Island.
The inhabitants of La Tomatera fought to save Lisney with the little they had. That image, that of a community trying to stop death while help is slow to arrive, runs through the case with an especially painful dimension. It is the reality of a woman allegedly murdered by someone who should have respected her decision to separate. It is also a reflection of a country where the life of a young mother depends completely on a motorcycle, a call interrupted by a blackout and an ambulance that takes too long to arrive.
