LAS TUNAS, Cuba. — A pool of blood (from a seriously ill patient in a ward at the Guillermo Domínguez hospital) that remained uncleaned for hours it was news on social media this Wednesday. The event showed the municipal hospital and Puerto Padre as the living image of the filth that is today, and for a long time, the country in which we live.
To be honest, that puddle of blood that no one drains—because, they say, there isn’t a cloth or a rag or a bit of sifted sawdust to absorb it—doesn’t surprise me. Today it’s blood, but it could be urine, phlegm from malignant tumors, and maybe tomorrow it’ll be shit. Today the news comes out of Puerto Padre, but tomorrow the voice of SOS will come from Guantánamo and the day after tomorrow the chronicle of the effluvia will reach us from Havana, because all of Cuba is a dunghill and the dung, although it seems to be extinguished, is burning for bottom, to turn it off you have to turn it.
And I am not surprised by the claim of the companion of a patient that, in the municipal hospital of Puerto Padre, she and the other inmates had to spend the night next to the blood vomited by a dying man, because I experienced similar events in that hospital, not with blood, but with all sorts of debris. The terrible hygiene in Cuban hospitals, with few exceptions, is well known.
My father and my mother died six years ago: he in February and she in July 2016. Years before, in April 2010, my mom had to be hospitalized urgently and underwent surgery for peritonitis; Shortly after, Dad was admitted for acute pulmonary edema. In both cases they had to complete the treatment at home. I was an uncomfortable companion for the goalkeepers of the institution. At my request and with the consent of the doctors, my mother, with the wound still open, infected, was discharged from the operating room. The surgeon came home to treat her on time. In the case of my father it was something similar, with the doctor’s authorization he came home still inflamed and with strong antibiotics, only for hospital use and for which injection into a vein I had to bring a nurse friend.
It turns out that during those two hospitalizations of my parents in the Guillermo Domínguez hospital, I had to face incidents similar to the one that is now news on social networks. And even today it strikes me that, on those occasions, it was precisely nurses and doctors who asked me to hand over the camera with which I took photographs of those incidents, a camera that was seized in one case by hospital security, who sent her to State Security. Later, the camera would be returned to me with the images deleted.
That makes me think that perhaps at this time an official from the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) is “interviewing” or preparing to “converse” with the person who posted bloody images of a cubicle at the Puerto Padre municipal hospital on social media, which More than a hospital ward, it resembles a pig slaughterhouse. But the operational officers of the political police are not magicians, but rather act due to information almost always provided by informers. I make the alert because, with few honorable exceptions, Puerto Padre is a town —as in any part of Cuba— where thieves-snitches abound.
In such a way, at the Guillermo Domínguez hospital, last night, neither a cloth nor a bit of tow or an old rag appeared, nor did a responsible person appear with a bit of sifted sawdust to dry the blood spilled by a patient in a “terminal state” as the video says. Perhaps there was a blanket for the floor, perhaps there was a cloth, perhaps even donated by charities and not provided by the Public Health administration, but perhaps those supplies donated by someone, as is often the case, left the state warehouse not for a sick, but on the way to the black market. When things like this happen, in the middle of a truth like this pool of unwashable blood, which someone has already described as a “political” or “counterrevolutionary” event, then it is not uncommon for the thief to be the police assistant. This is how what in Cuba is called “a prosperous and sustainable socialism” works.
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