This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. For the two Cuban girls, 12 and 13 years old, it was just another sex party with foreign tourists β videotaped, fueled by marijuana and alcohol, and involving sex with both men and women. But this time, year-old Lilian Ramirez Espinosa, who suffered from asthma, gasped and blacked out, according to court documents in the case.
Her badly decomposed body was found five days later on the isolated outskirts of the eastern city of Bayamo. Canadian, Spanish and other male tourists are flying regularly to the communist-ruled island to have sex with minors, a joint investigation by the Toronto Star and El Nuevo Herald has found.
Diversent says she was not surprised that girls as young as the ones in Bayamo were having sex for pay in a country where kids usually start having sex at the age of 12 or 13 and families face shortages of everything from tomatoes to lipstick. Simone Pini, 45, and Angelo Malavasi, 48, are serving year prison sentences for murder and corruption of minors while Luigi Sartorio, 48, was sentenced to 20 years.
The Cubans received sentences ranging from 20 to 30 years. And the sex parties had been going on since mid Nancy Munoz Yero, the mother of one of the Cuban adults convicted in the case, said Lilian and a girlfriend were known to hang around with foreigners visiting Bayamo, as well as adult local men.
They were posted on the Internet by the dissident news agency Hablemos Press. Lilian and a year-old girl were picked up by Pini and a Cuban youth year a Bayamo middle school for a party, according to one of the videos. The court ruling indicated two other girls aged 13 and 14 turned up separately, but it was not clear if they engaged in sex acts, Diversent said.
