MIAMI, United States.- Ángela Álvarez Almaguer, 64, a resident of the Holguín province, in eastern Cuba, explained to the cameras of Palenque Vision the situation she lives with her bedridden husband.
“All his life he worked in what is MICONS”, provincial companies subscribed to the Ministry of Construction at the national level. There he worked for years as a driver, today nobody visits him or helps him, Angela Álvarez revealed.
Her husband, she said, left the bank one day and tripped that changed her life. “His legs swelled up. He lost one of them, and after three months he lost the other one”, since then he has been bedridden, and moves thanks to a wheelchair. She is the one who watches over both of them.
The pension of the husband of Ángela Álvarez, who is 71 years old, is just over 1,500 pesos a month, money that is not enough for them, considering what they have to invest in medicines, many of which they have to buy at the black market because in pharmacies there is none.
“Only in overpriced medicines I had to buy more than 2,000 pesos,” he denounced.
Among the medications that Ángela Álvarez buys at a premium outside Cuban state pharmacies are the antibiotics that her husband needs: “amikacin and cephalexin.”
Ángela Álvarez is also sick, she suffers from ischemic heart disease and gout, but she is the breadwinner of the house.
On the question of whether they eat well, he answered: “We feed ourselves as we can, we don’t go hungry, but it’s not what an elderly person needs.”
This elderly couple does not receive help from the government or any Cuban institution, only the goodwill of some neighbors when possible, “because we are all in the same situation.”
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