Havana/The generalized mobilization that the regime is now undertaking to “sanitize” the streets and thus combat the arboviruses spread throughout the country arrives late and, above all, makes Cubans very tired. While the ruling party gives publicity to the “temporary confrontation groups” organized not only in Havana and Matanzasbut in other provinces such as Villa Clara either Ciego de Ávilatestimonies multiply about a more than worrying health situation.
To San Miguel del Padrón, border with the municipality of Cotorro, in Havana, where for weeks fever and ailments of various kinds have had many of its inhabitants lying down, “representatives” of Public Health arrived a few days ago to discuss “the epidemiological issue.” They ordered the gathered population “we must use the mask again”, to which those present became insubordinate: “Masks are no longer sold anywhere and we also have nothing to buy them with, we barely have money to eat.”
Also in Havana, this Friday, the Loyola Center announced that it was closing its doors due to “the presence of several collaborators and children with dengue, hepatitis and other diseases”, until next Friday, October 17. The mention of various conditions is not in vain: in reality, people still do not know what exactly they have.
Pedro, a Havana resident from the municipality of Diez de Octubre, fell ill, and worriedly tells 14ymedio the case of a pregnant niece, who began to feel bad “with the virus that is out there” and ended up admitted to the Hijas de Galicia maternity hospital. “Finally, what do we have? How do we fight it?” he says he asked the girl, hoping that the doctors would have given her a diagnosis. She dashed his hopes: “Pipo, I can tell you that the doctors don’t know what it is.”
“There are no deaths in Matanzas from this disease. There are neither serious cases nor critical cases nor are there deaths,” said the Minister of Public Health.
On Wednesday, the Minister of Public Health, José Ángel Portal Mirandatried to reassure the inhabitants of Matanzas – where the epidemic is hitting hardest and where the first warning voices to the independent press –, precisely saying that the dengue and chikungunya diseases circulating in the province “are neither new, nor rare, nor unknown.” Likewise, he forcefully denied that there had been any deaths due to these causes.
“There are no deaths in Matanzas from this disease. There are no serious cases, nor are there critical cases, nor are there deaths from this disease. No one can hide an epidemic or the dead,” he asserted, urging us to “convey to people that we do not stop knowing that we have problems, but that we are doing everything to save their lives.”
This Friday, Giron qualified the minister’s forcefulness without saying it, by recognizing between the lines that the province “is complicated.” “Matanzas does not have the level of bazookas necessary to fumigate intensively in each health area, which is why a municipal brigade was created,” the note says. “Each health center will have said equipment to block febrile cases and the rest will go to the most complex areas.”
The provincial newspaper also indicated that hospitals “articulate strategies in the face of so much demand for their services, and multiply beds,” without detailing anything else. This Thursday, 14ymedio confirmed that the shelters of the Matanzas University of Medical Sciences have been evacuated and converted into an improvised hospital, due to the overflow of the clinics.
They not only contradict the minister testimonies reached this independent newspaperbut rather voices not suspected of being disaffected, like the journalist from Radio Varadero Yirmara Torres Hernandez. In a post Posted on her Facebook wall, the communicator reported the death of the 76-year-old grandmother of her son’s friend. When she asked the cause, he told her: “She had surgery for something in her stomach, but she caught chikungunya and died.”
Torres Hernandez then confesses that he already knew about deaths from chikungunya a long time ago, when he wrote about his experience after suffering from the disease and warned about “what was happening in Matanzas” and “about what could happen if nothing was done.”
“In that text I said that I was not aware that there were deaths, although I already knew of people who were dying, not because of the virus, but because they were complicated by another underlying disease,” he says. “Several people then wrote to me internally to tell me about their deaths.” One of them, a former university professor of his whose grandmother had lost her husband to “one of those viruses”: she had been admitted to the Faustino Pérez hospital for a day.
To her publication, she attached the text of her former teacher, who bitterly lamented the situation that is experienced daily and that can complicate these sufferings: “It is true that chikungunya does not kill. It disables and ‘kills’ it, but it does not kill. What happens is that we are unprotected to face this and any other disease, because we do not have electricity, or water, or access to medicine, or food. What happens is that We live in constant stress, we are malnourished, immunosuppressed. What happens is that unhealthiness corrodes cities and homes. What happens is that we don’t use veneer, that we have to store water in whatever we can and that outside of Havana we live in permanent darkness. The nights are for mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches… What anti-vector control is there going to be like this?
And he denounced: “There are no deaths, but there are. Many families, neighbors know that, and doctors and politicians who have not lost their humanity know it.”
And he denounced: “There are no deaths, but there are. Many families, neighbors know that, and doctors and politicians know it, who have not lost their humanity. They do not have the slightest idea of what is happening in Cuba. Every day there are more demonstrations of total disconnection. Respect for the people, just a little respect.”
He post from Torres Hernández was immediately filled with comments that abounded in confirmation of deaths. “Chikungunya does not usually appear as a direct cause on death certificates,” explained engineer Yulieta Hernández Díaz. “But in people with chronic diseases, in minors and in older adults, it can generate complications that lead to fatal outcomes. In the absence of medications to treat hypertension, diabetes, infections, the virus acts as a trigger.”
Nubia Álvarez, for her part, recounts the death of her father, who despite being 82 years old and hypertensive, “was strong, agile and well fed.” On September 19, “he woke up with a lot of pain in his legs, within minutes the fever started, in the afternoon he couldn’t walk anymore, we almost had to carry him,” he says. “We hydrated him, we lowered his fever, his feet got stiff, on Monday he fainted, we gave him IV and he went to the hospital.” There, the man began to become delirious, was admitted to intensive care two days later and, the following Friday, he died.
“A neighbor died in the neighborhood, an elderly woman, well cared for by her family. Tata, the aunt of a dear friend, also died. On my block we are all sick,” said Amarilys Ribot.
Users also multiplied their criticism of the Government, mainly for the concealment of information. “They try to avoid at all costs that the very poor tourism that exists is even worse,” estimated Ariel Casañas, who recalled that the Varadero hotel hub is in Matanzas.
Other commentators allude to the fact that a similar panorama, of silence and skimping on data, occurred during the covid-19 pandemic.
Other commentators allude to the fact that a similar panorama, of silence and skimping on data, occurred during the covid-19 pandemic. Dairon Alberto Jiménez expressed, with resignation: “How sad it is to see and feel that they treat us like figures, that they treat us like damaged merchandise, that they treat us like idiots.”
For his part, designer Darel Rochiel Robinson, whose mother fell ill, attested that “for weeks now, dengue and chikungunya have been circulating with increasing force.” And he warned: “This is not just a personal story. It is a sign of collapse. A health system that does not respond, an epidemic that advances without control, and a population that gets sick in silence. There are no public statistics, no risk maps, or differentiated care. Only vulnerable bodies and an uncertainty that settles in every home. It is urgent to talk about this. It is urgent to make visible what is happening. Because silence also makes you sick.”
