Ernesto, a neighbor of the Kilo 12 neighborhood in the city of Sancti Spíritus, has had to wait for the relaxation of measures due to the covid-19 pandemic to go to the dentist. For almost two years he has had several cavities that bother him but since the arrival of the coronavirus on the Island they began to treat only emergency cases. Unable to bear the toothaches for another day, he decided to go to the Provincial Stomatological Clinic this Monday. Upon arriving at the health center, he found the receptionist talking on the phone with her feet up on a piece of furniture; he had to wait about ten minutes for the state employee to attend to him.
“Only emergencies were being attended,” the woman said bluntly, as soon as Ernesto asked if they were taking turns for consultations. “I can’t keep waiting, it’s been almost two years without attention, I get a lot of pain when I drink cold water,” the patient explained. “The autoclave (equipment used to sterilize the instruments) is broken”, justified the employee. “And it is not known when they will fix it.”
Ernesto then asked if he could be treated urgently and that they do some procedure to stop feeling pain, but the receptionist asked him that there were no materials in the clinic for this procedure either. “I can pass you to get swept up, but we don’t even have materials to cover you there,” he added.
The man did not lose hope of solving his ailment and decided to go to a polyclinic in the city to be treated and “at least they put a temporary filling or a band-aid” as it is popularly known, he told 14ymedio.
“My quality of life has been reduced, I can’t eat anything cold, I can’t eat sweets and I can’t eat anything that I have to chew a lot either”
When visiting two polyclinics, he found several people in the same situation, who were also informed that there were no materials and that the emergencies were being treated at the Provincial Clinic until six in the afternoon, right at the health center where he had gone before. and where they assured him that they had nothing to attend to his cavities, only to open a hole and leave it exposed until there were materials. “They tell you that there are no materials, but if you loosen a little money they treat you. Medical power? Power of lies is what we are,” complained one of the group’s patients.
The panorama is repeated throughout the island. In Havana, 34-year-old Niurka Tamaris has “a hole in a tooth” that she has managed to overcome by filling with gum, pieces of adhesive tape and other emergency solutions. “My quality of life has been reduced, I can’t eat anything cold, I can’t eat sweets and I can’t eat anything that I have to chew too much.”
Tamaris’s problem started in December 2019. A grinding wheel, with an old aluminum filling, broke a piece. After several attempts to be treated at her polyclinic in the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, she returned home discouraged. “When there was no lack of electricity, it was because the sterilizing apparatus was broken or else there were no gloves.”
The stomatologist who attended her last visit assured her that new supplies would arrive in the summer of 2020 and the problem could be solved. But what came before was the coronavirus and a cracked tooth did not classify as an “emergency” to be treated in the Guard Corps. “They told me the only thing they could do was extract it and I didn’t want to lose it.”
A year and a half later, he still has the problem that threatens to generate an infection. “Now the situation is even worse because they tell you that they are attending to pending cases according to the order of severity and, a tooth that is missing a piece but does not have a phlegmon, is nothing that they are going to attend to first.”
“Here they talk a lot about the quality of Public Health but you have to look at people’s teeth, in very bad condition,” says Tamaris. “My sister, who is four years older, does not have a tooth left and my father has needed a prosthesis for four years and there is no material to make it.”
“Here they talk a lot about the quality of Public Health but you have to look at people’s teeth, in very bad condition”
The Ministry of Public Health affirmed last March that “despite the pandemic and the intensification of the United States embargo, Cuba arrived on World Oral Health Day with dental indicators similar to those of the most developed countries.”
However, the problems of infrastructure, materials and power cuts have become a constant in Cuban state stomatological services, practically the only ones allowed in the country where the profession only has been able to be exercised privately for those showing a graduate degree from before 1959 or obtained outside national borders.
The few private cabinets that still remain on the island are suffocated by the inability to import supplies and to hire personnel who have obtained a diploma in “the revolutionary universities.” Hence, many professionals perform illegal jobs in the same official premises or maintain a small informal dental office that they feed with products purchased on the black market diverted from state distribution networks.
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