Havana/Pedro Daniel Bernad, the spanish tourist who remained in critical condition in Cuba, finally arrived in Spain this Monday. The charter flight that took him from Havana landed after four in the afternoon at the Zaragoza airport, thus closing several weeks of uncertainty and complaints from his family about the deplorable conditions at the Arnaldo Milián Castro hospital, in Santa Clara, where he was admitted for an intestinal obstruction.
“An ambulance from service 061 was waiting at the foot of the track and transferred him to the intensive care unit of the Lozano Blesa Clinical Hospital in the Aragonese capital, where he will remain admitted after arriving intubated and sedated,” reported Herald of Aragon in a note.
A native of Épila, a small municipality in Zaragoza, Bernad had traveled to the Island on October 3 with the intention of enjoying a vacation, but a week later he was hospitalized in Santa Clara. His health deteriorated rapidly, as his relatives explained to several Spanish media, when his condition became complicated with pneumonia that kept him in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
His sister and brother-in-law, Daniel Mosteo, traveled to the Island and described an alarming reality. “It is a country with very little health infrastructure,” Mosteo summarized to The reason. “When you see the material and hygienic conditions of the hospital, your heart skips a beat,” he added. The shortage of medicines was such that the family had to obtain antibiotics through the Spanish consulate. “He only has the dose covered for this Tuesday of the seven days in which it is necessary to administer it,” the family member then lamented.
Given the patient’s deterioration, the couple began efforts to repatriate him, although the procedures with the travel insurer and the Spanish consulate dragged on for days. The company alleged that repatriation on a “medical plane”, whose cost amounts to 150,000 euros, “is limited to some countries.” The embassy, for its part, informed them that an official return “is only contemplated in situations of collective emergency.”
Frustrated, Mosteo critical the lack of institutional support: “I don’t understand why it is not complementary for extremely serious situations. Why do we pay taxes, if when you need it most it does not pay off for you. It is a very serious situation, it is not a migraine that you get abroad, and you do not receive support from your Government.”
The Épila City Council also intervened in the case and reported that it was carrying out “all possible steps to help the situation improve and his return to be achieved as soon as possible.” Finally, after multiple efforts and fears that it was too late, Bernad was able to return to Zaragoza this Monday.
Last April, Canadians Christian Maurais and Caroline Tétrault lived a similar experience in the same Santa Clara hospital, where the woman underwent emergency surgery for appendicitis. “There was no light, no minimum conditions. It seemed like a horror movie, but the doctors worked miracles with what they had,” Maurais told the Quebec press.
The testimonies of both cases coincide: lack of antibiotics, food deficiencies and lack of basic resources. Many foreign patients turn to the black market to obtain medicine and food, also exposing themselves to the risk of resorting to illegal currency exchange.
In March, another incident shocked the international community when Syrian-Canadian citizen Faraj Allah Jarjour died while on vacation in Cuba and his family received back a coffin containing the wrong body. Despite official apologies, the case remains unsolved.
