Havana Street Party Ends in Fistfight

As Cuba’s neighbourhood watch network celebrated its 52nd anniversary in late September, the party in one Havana neighbourhood came to an abrupt end with a street fight between local residents.

Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, CDR, exist everywhere in Cuba, and function as neighbourhood bodies tasked both with community work and with sniffing out “counter-revolutionary activity”.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro established CDRs in the year following the 1959 revolution as a way of encouraging citizens to inform on each other. Most Cubans formally register as members of their local CDR.

In Managua, a neighbourhood of Havana’s Arroyo Naranja district, the local CDR’s anniversary party turned nasty when two young people got into an argument, and were joined by friends and relatives.

Residents of Managua’s San Isidro Road said more than 20 people – women as well as men – took part in the street battle.

Eyewitness Leandro Vives said locals and other party guests waded in to try to stop the fight, but then became embroiled in it themselves.

“Suddenly I was trapped in the middle of the fracas. The street was like a hornet’s nest…. I saw a few people hit with bottles and slabs of wood,” he said.

Eight people needed medical attention afterwards, the most serious cases being a man who needed stitches after being hit over the head with a bottle, and another who had a fractured wrist and a large cut in his shoulder where he was attacked with a broken bottle.

Marta Hevia, mother of a 16-year-old who was injured in the fight, said the police only turned up when the dust had settled, even though their station is under 100 metres away from where the battle took place.

“They’re always late. They only turn up when it’s time to gather up the wounded,” she said. “They concentrate more on going after people who try to sell things to buy food than they do on keeping the peace,” she said.

Police only discovered there was something going on when the Managua Polyclinic phoned them to let them know people were coming in with injuries from a fight.

With the help of CDR head Lázaro Báez, police identified and detained the major culprits.

Four men were fined 500 pesos each, a sum that although equivalent to just 20 US dollars is more than the average Cuban earns in a month. Others were charged with public disorder and fined 30 pesos each. All those charged were banned from taking part in future festivities.

Báez said the celebrations held by CDRs in Cuba were no longer what they used to be – the “fervour of political ideology” was long gone.

“People just go… to dance and drink,” he said ruefully. As a result, he said, this was the second year the Managua party had ended in a fight.