Madrid/The First Criminal Chamber of the Popular Provincial Court of Santiago de Cuba sentenced Guillermo Sánchez Gutiérrez to life imprisonment for stabbing to death the head of the National Police subsector of the area where he lived, in the municipality of Palma Soriano, as published this Saturday by the official newspaper Sierra Maestra.
The ruling was announced this Saturday after a trial described as “exemplary”, corresponding to case 73 of 2026, in which the accused received the sentence for the crimes of murder, illegal carrying of a knife, home invasion and threats, with the aggravating circumstance of acting out of revenge.
The crime dates back to July 19, 2025. According to the court’s report, that day Sánchez Gutiérrez found the National Police assistant dressed in civilian clothes, at a neighbor’s house. There she unexpectedly attacked him with a knife and caused a deep wound in his leg, “telling him that it was the last time she would see him.”
Although he was injured, the agent managed to run about 60 meters and took refuge in another neighbor’s home. The attacker chased him there, broke down the door and stabbed him again in the abdomen, back and legs. The note states that he only left when he was sure that he had killed him.
To set the life sentence, the court took into account “the connotation of the event” and the “high social danger” of an event that affects a person who was fulfilling his duties as a police assistant.
The sentence applies articles 344 and 380 of the Penal Code, which punish murder with between 20 and 30 years of deprivation of liberty, with life or the death penalty, and housebreaking with between 2 and 5 years. The court also appreciated the aggravating factor of acting out of revenge or retaliation, provided for in article 80.
The convicted person was also deprived of public rights, in addition to the obligation to pay a pension for each of the victim’s two minor children and to assume the funeral expenses.
To set the life sentence, the court took into account “the connotation of the event”, the “high social danger” of an event that affects a person who was fulfilling his duties as a Police auxiliary and the characteristics of the accused, described as having bad social behavior and having a criminal record.
In the comments to the news published by the official media, numerous users criticized that such a severe sentence is not applied with the same rigor when the victims are civilians, something that, according to several of them, occurs especially in cases of feminicide, a crime that has already been overcome in the first ten months of 2026. the total of the entire previous yearaccording to this newspaper’s account. “When they murder a woman or another person, why isn’t it the same procedure?” wrote one user. One commentator summed up the discomfort like this: “Once again a sentence that is not applied equally to murders of women, children and rapists. It is not fair.”
“Once again a sentence that is not applied equally to murders of women, children and rapists. It is not fair”
This is not the first time that Cuban justice has resorted to life imprisonment when the victim is an agent. In February this yearthe same court in Santiago de Cuba also sentenced three young people to life imprisonment for murdering and stealing a motorcycle from a police officer. In March, the Provincial Court of Camagüey imposed life sentence on Osvaldo Fernandez Pichardo for stabbing an agent who survived, a case that the authorities described as “terrorism” and in which they claimed that someone from the United States had offered her $600 for the attack.
These are just a few examples from this year, but the cases have been known before, presented by the official press as exemplary trials. In 2020, another young man was sentenced also to life imprisonment for killing a police officer in a unit in Calabazar, in Havana, and injuring two others.
The official note does not give the name of the murdered agent. A few days after the crime, independent media had published that a police officer identified as Yoleysi was fatally stabbed in the Paraná neighborhood of Palma Soriano, when he was trying to deliver a summons to a young man. The coincidences of place, approximate date and weapon suggest that it is the same case.
The sentence comes at a time when the east of the country is experiencing a streak of crimes that the authorities do not officially publish. In Palma Soriano, for example, there were independently three murders in just three months. Women, furthermore, are among the most frequent victims of this violence in the province: in June, Rosaidis Donatien23 years old, was murdered by her husband, also in Palma Soriano; in July he died Merlin Noay17, days after her stepfather attacked her in Yerba de Guinea, in Songo La Maya; and in September, Yadelaine Roque Torres, 25, was murdered by her ex-partner in a rural area close to El Cobre.
Crime in Cuba shows signs of increasingly lethal violence, which advances alongside the alarming crisis that the country is going through. According to the Cubalex monitoringIn August, 52 homicides were documented, 40.5% more than the 37 in July, marking a record for the second consecutive month in the independent organization’s records. That month, 314 acts of violence and insecurity were also recorded in total, including homicides, robberies and assaults.
