“She naked” exposes child marriage in Cuba

Six women, the same town and a common story: that all of them were married while still children in a rural town in eastern Cuba. This is the core of the documentary “She Naked,” which was screened for the first time this week on the island.

In statements to EFE Karelis Herrera, one of the two filmmakers of the documentary, explains that her objective is to “draw the attention of the authorities and the international community to the issue” and “make them reflect that it is not right, that To become a woman of a house at 12 or 13 is to lose your childhood.”.

“She is naked” (2021), also directed by Yenny Pérez, tells the experience of Dayaneira Caridad (17 years old), Vilma Rodríguez (53), Caridad Martínez (48), Yanet Rodríguez (35), Yoandra Cámbara (28) and Aurora Rodríguez (63), who share the fact of having gotten married when they were still children.

These women live in the Marias of Palmaritoa rural neighborhood of 112 people located near the Gibara municipality, almost 780 kilometers from Havana, in the Holguín province (east). Only 4 of the 63 women who currently live there were married when they were over 16, the documentary narrates.

They all also have in common a low level of schooling and economic dependence on their respective husbands from the moment they left their homes, the filmmakers say.

Vilma, for example, tells the camera that she was living with her parents when she met Adrián, her first husband. He was 31 years old and she was just 14 when they married. She studied until the sixth grade of primary school and at that age she became a housewife. She had her first child when she was 15 years old..

Caridad, another of the protagonists, remembers: “since I got married I started doing everything (in the house). I didn’t know how to do anything. “I was a girl.”

“Almost a tradition”

The documentary arose when Herrera realized that getting married at a very young age was “normalized and it was almost a tradition” in that town.

A place, as he says, “where everyone understood that it was not a problem if two people fell in love even when they were minors and the worst thing was that in most cases it was with men three times their age.”

“That was the starting point and hearing their stories in first person was what made us reflect and want to tell this great truth, which not only affects the rural areas of the East, but also happens in many places and no measures are taken or neither informative nor penal measures to stop this situation,” considered the young director.

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warns that one in four young women in Latin America and the Caribbean married for the first time or had an early union before turning 18.

According to that report, these “girl wives” are more likely to live in rural areas, in poor homes, and to have a lower level of education. UNICEF considers child marriage “a violation of human rights”.

In the case of Cuba, the Family Code approved by referendum in 2022 eliminated the legal exception that in rare cases allowed girls to marry – with parental permission – from the age of 14 and boys from the age of 16. Currently, The minimum age is 18.

In 2022, 619 marriages of girls between 14 and 17 years old were registered, according to the Demographic Yearbook of that year from the National Office of Statistics and Information (Onei).

Herrera explains to EFE that “the documentary is not to show what happens to an entire community like the Marías of Palmarito, but also to capture what happens to many girls who become victims throughout the country.”

The film was screened this Thursday in space «Cinema under the Stars» at the Norwegian Embassy in Havana, which helped in its production together with the Norwegian Fund for Cuban Cinema, the NGO Centro Félix Varela and the independent production company Kasasus Producciones.