In every block, block, neighborhood, town or city, entire families lie dejected, without the strength to move a limb.
HAVANA.- Health alerts saturate and shake the networks. We Cubans are dropping like flies. One or several viruses keep us in bed with fever, extreme weakness, headache and joint pain, vomiting, diarrhea, skin rashes and other symptoms. There are many who also report urinary and intestinal incontinence. Nobody is safe. In every corner of the country there are families bedridden, without energy to move.
Judging by the symptoms, these are several arbovirus. However, very few – compared to the total number of infected people – have been able to confirm it with certainty, since access to medical care is almost impossible. Those investigations to locate cases of fever were forgotten. The majority of those affected do not go to the doctor, not only because they cannot take a step or lack transportation, but because they have lost faith in a health system that is clearly inoperative. This reluctance is reinforced when a family member or neighbor returns from the polyclinic or hospital narrating the nightmare they experienced: crowded hallways, patients on the floor, hours and hours of waiting, absence of reagents to confirm the diagnosis and, in the end, the recommendation to drink fluids and rest. If anything, a doctor suggests—who does not prescribe—a drug that we must obtain at any price in the informal market, because they simply do not exist in state pharmacies.
The current epidemic is nothing more than the logical and foreseeable consequence of the horrifying panorama in which we have been immersed for years. The entire island is a gigantic breeding ground for mosquitoes. With a few exceptions – kept in relatively good condition for the benefit of the bosses and their foreign guests – the country’s streets and avenues are so destroyed that we are no longer talking about potholes, but rather lagoons, which naturally act as water collectors. And not just from rain, but also from drinking water that overflows and accumulates every other day, or when the neighborhood is lucky enough to receive the sporadic supply. Of this, more runs through the streets than that which reaches homes.
It has been years since people fumigated inside the houses nor have they seen that truck passing by at dawn and dusk on the streets emitting smoke. Long before, the Community Services brigades in charge of mowing gardens, flower beds and barren state lots disappeared, where tall grass is a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Result: mosquitoes make us heavier.
The outrageous government “solution” is nothing more than another mockery at the expense of the people: making the victims themselves – the citizens – responsible for the cleaning and sanitation of the stables. Unfortunately, as so often happens, some serve as their accomplices and play along. This pantomime would not achieve the desired effect without the unconditional participation of the official media, which are quick to spread reports about neighborhood mobilizations sweeping and turning garbage from one place to another.
In the face of health emergencies like this, the regime tries to distance itself from its proverbial indolence and ineptitude, blaming the “shortage caused by the blockade.” However, a quick tour of the Internet is enough to dismantle such a fallacy: the long-suffering and battered Castro regime constantly receives million-dollar donations from allied nations—and from others that are not so allied—specifically destined for the public health sector and environmental sanitation, among other areas.
And while those resources drain away through who knows what administrative twists and turns, we convalescents are remedied, if anything, with everything imaginable decoctions. Because to the wise presidential council of “don’t let mosquitoes bite us”…we haven’t gotten the hang of it yet.
