The Offspring of the Crisis in Cuba
Teenage violence is on the rise
HAVANA TIMES — For weeks now, the hordes of children and teenagers who used to chase tourists begging for money at the corners of Prado in Havana have disappeared.
At times, their behavior escalated to harassment or theft, prompting many foreign visitors to share advice on social media about how to deal with them while strolling along that central Havana walkway. Meanwhile, authorities treated the phenomenon as a public security issue, limiting themselves to occasional police sweeps in the area and sending some of the youngsters to juvenile detention centers.
Over the past several years, the number of children engaged in this activity had grown in step with the worsening economic crisis and the unstoppable devaluation of the Cuban peso against foreign currencies: a couple of dollars given by a generous tourist amounted to half of the legally established monthly minimum wage.
The disappearance of the young beggars was highlighted as a success of the government’s “social prevention work.” This was how Alexis Acosta Silva, the mayor of Old Havana, where the Prado promenade is located, described it in a recent interview. Conveniently, the official overlooked the fact that this “achievement” was actually due to the lack of foreign visitors, and that the children had not left the streets but had simply moved to other parts of the capital.
They are now commonly seen in the Vedado and Miramar neighborhoods. Many of Cuba’s wealthiest residents live there, and in the absence of tourists, they have become the new targets of the children’s requests for money and attempts at theft.
In the middle of last week, writer and essayist Julio Cesar Gonzelez reported how two minors had tried to rob him in broad daylight on a busy street in Vedado.
“They wanted to steal my grocery bag. One asked me for money while the other tried to snatch it from behind. I hit the second one over the head with the bag, and he ran off shouting, ‘This old man is crazy!’”
Similar incidents have become common in the neighborhood, the city’s most central district, lined with embassies and government ministries and located less than a kilometer from the Palace of the Revolution, headquarters of the Presidency and the Council of Ministers.
But Vedado is also Cuba’s oldest neighborhood in terms of population age and probably has one of the highest percentages of vacant homes, largely because their owners have emigrated. Thieves, including many teenagers, take advantage of these circumstances to commit crimes.
Given the inaction of the police, many residents have organized to confront them, Gonzalez noted, though he remains pessimistic about the future.
“The abrupt end of the school year and the precarious conditions we live in will continue feeding the ranks of child and teenage thieves,” he predicted.
Social media is full of videos showing minors caught stealing or committing other crimes. At the beginning of June, four teenagers were arrested for assaulting a security guard with knives in the city of Camagüey. A fifth suspect was still at large when this article was written.
Security camera footage of the incident, shared thousands of times on Facebook, sparked public outrage and forced police to quickly track down the culprits. All of them were under the age of 16.
But most crimes are not solved so quickly, many internet users argued. Even after arrest, numerous offenders are released under pretexts such as their young age.
Growing up poorer
As violence increases, many people have begun calling for tougher laws or even a security model similar to that of Bukele in El Salvador.
Along with Argentina, Cuba has the highest age of criminal responsibility in Latin America and the Caribbean: 16 years old. This means, for example, that the attackers of the Camagüey security guard cannot be sentenced to prison, even though they allegedly tried to stab him several times during the robbery.
Likewise, the youths who assaulted Julio Cesar Gonzalez would likely be too young to stand trial. In contrast, in many countries across the Americas and Europe, criminal defendants can be prosecuted beginning at ages 12 or 14.
“I don’t understand how, in the middle of such a huge crisis, they do nothing. Any one of those ‘little kids’ is walking around with a knife ready to use it because they either have no sense of consequences or they know nothing will happen to them. They put them in a reform school, and two or three months later they’re back on the streets,” complained Yordanis Cala, an employee at a private restaurant in Camagüey.
In January, he had to leave a much better-paying job at a bar that stayed open until dawn after several “kids who looked like middle school students” tried to rob him.
Cuba has a Juvenile Care System coordinated by the Ministries of the Interior and Education. It is supposed to supervise children and adolescents involved in delinquent behavior, struggling in school, or coming from dysfunctional families. In practice, however, the agency functions poorly due to a lack of resources and qualified personnel.
Indeed, in Camagüey a few months ago, the case of three siblings between the ages of two and seven made headlines. They were suffering abuse and neglect at the hands of their mother. The situation unfolded in full view of the neighborhood and just a few yards from one of the local offices of the Communist Party. Only public denunciations on social media prompted authorities to intervene and transfer the children to a home for minors without parental care.
In other cases, parental neglect is not the root cause. Instead, it is the country’s severe economic situation.
As early as 2024, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) included Cuba for the first time in its report on child food insecurity. According to its estimates, 42% of Cuban children and adolescents were living under those conditions, compared to a Latin American average of around 38%.
Since then, the crisis has only worsened, hitting especially hard the large families that, in theory, should be supported by the Demographic Policy Program overseen by the Council of Ministers.
“The available data reveal a troubling increase in poverty and food insecurity in the country. Since 2015, Cuba has fallen 16 places in the global Human Development Index (HDI) ranking,” researcher Tamarys Bahamonde wrote last year in an article for the Cuba Capacity Building project at Columbia University.
At the time of her analysis, Havana’s hotels were still operating and, albeit intermittently, fuel tankers were still arriving. Now, neither is the case.