Havana/In recent weeks, the hospitals and offices throughout Cuba They have been filled with patients with high fever, rashes, joint pain and extreme fatigue. The lack of reagents in the laboratories and the high number of patients who do not even go to the hospital make it difficult to know if it is dengue, oropouche, chikungunya, zika or another arbovirus, transmitted by mosquitoes.
Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old man from Havana, is still recovering from what he calls “the virus”, without knowing if it is the dreaded chikungunya. “This week I was several times in a friend’s cafeteria. People arrived half-zombie, with red and swollen eyes. Several businesses in the area are closed because the workers were also infected. In Regla it is normal for an entire block to be infested,” he tells 14ymedio.
His story, full of details about the aftermath and daily challenges, reveals the rigors of convalescence. “First I got mild muscle pain. That night I had a very high fever and tremors. At dawn I saw my whole body was full of rash (skin rash). By eleven in the morning I could no longer get out of bed. I got sores in my mouth and my face was peeled,” he says. “Moving caused me pain. Luckily I had my girlfriend, who made me soup and gave me paracetamol. I thought about the people who have no one, because moving from one room to another was a feat.”
The official bulletins on the health situation are vague and very general
“The saddest thing,” he adds, “is that no one knows for sure what they have. Since there are no reagents for analysis in hospitals, one assumes that they have one of the variants and simply calls it ‘the virus’. This is how we live: diagnosing by eye.”
The official bulletins on the health situation are vague and very general. In the press conferences of the Ministry of Public Health there is talk of an increase in these ailments but the numbers and updated statistics are missing. So far only one figure has been published: three deaths from dengue so far this year. But social networks tell another story: names, photos and goodbyes of neighbors, doctors and relatives who have succumbed to what people call, with resignation and fear, “the virus that goes around.”
Dr. Perla María Trujillo Pedroza, a specialist in Comprehensive General Medicine at the Manuel Piti Fajardo Polyclinic in Santo Domingo (Villa Clara) and with years of experience in provincial hospitals, decided to break the silence on your Facebook wall. “I am very worried about this chikungunya situation,” she wrote, “I don’t know if it is because I am suffering it firsthand or because this slave soul of a researcher makes me see beyond what we can touch today.” His postshared hundreds of times, is a professional cry of alarm in the midst of a health crisis that the Government prefers to call a “controlled outbreak.”
“If the first cases date back to July 2025, how is it possible that there is still no clinical guideline for the management of this disease?” asks the specialist. “Wake up. Cuban doctors are improvising on the fly in the treatment of chikungunya, especially in its subacute phase.” In his own hospital ward, he says, he treated 47 patients with symptoms compatible with the virus. “Of them, 34 had an evolution of more than 15 days and 28 were in the subacute stage. That is 82%, well above what is reported in the literature.”
His calculations – and the frankness with which he shares them – contrast with the opacity and institutional triumphalism. Meanwhile, in the neighborhoods, testimonies of people bedridden, unable to walk due to pain in their joints or with peeling skin after several days of fever, are multiplying. “Why aren’t we talking about the implications of evolving into chronicity?” insists Trujillo. “This causes a violent, disabling polyarthritis. What will become of this country’s poor economy when it rains medical certificates or licenses for workers who must care for its almost disabled elderly?”
In the Guard Corps of the Calixto García hospital, in Havana, the panorama is the same as that described by Dr. Trujillo. Nieves, an oncology patient, went there last Friday seeking relief from unbearable joint pain. “They had nothing to relieve the pain and it was full of people with symptoms similar to mine, especially many elderly people,” he says. “After an hour in line and hearing that everyone was told ‘rest and plenty of fluids’, I decided to return home.”
“No one gives you a clear answer, they don’t even know if this can complicate the treatment. They just tell you to rest”
Nieves fears that she will not be able to attend her chemotherapy session this week. “I’m very weak. Nobody gives you a clear answer, they don’t even know if this can complicate the treatment. They just tell you to rest.” In several hospitals in Havana – according to medical sources consulted by this newspaper – the same scene is repeated: full rooms, doctors without specific medicines, and reports of cases with prolonged consequences.
“I have had the symptoms for a month and I am using my body as a guinea pig,” Dr. Trujillo confessed. “I can’t let myself die from the pain, many depend on me. If I have positive results, I’ll tell you.” In another time, a voice like that would have been attacked by the official medical union. Today, his colleagues respond with emojis of encouragement and thanks in the comments.
Partial data obtained by specialists from the health system itself indicate that in Havana and Santiago de Cuba the incidence of arboviruses has doubled since July. In the capital alone, the Calixto García, Freyre de Andrade (Emergencies) hospitals and the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK) concentrate the majority of admissions, but confirmatory analyzes are barely carried out.
Chikungunya, a name that in the African Makonde language means “to bend over in pain” (in reference to the severe joint pain caused by the disease), arrived in Cuba in 2014. It is transmitted by the same mosquito that causes dengue and Zika, the Aedes aegyptiwhich proliferates in unfumigated yards, uncovered tanks and flooded neighborhoods. The rains from Hurricane Melissa and the lack of sanitation could further increase the presence of the insect, especially in the east of the Island.
In the news, advice to boil water and use mosquito nets is repeated, but there is no mention of saturated hospitals, sick leave, or patients who have not been able to walk for weeks. Meanwhile, in the corridors of Calixto, on the streets of Regla or on the walls of Facebook, the entire country continues coughing, shaking and wondering, without an answer: what is the real name of the disease that has us like this?
