At least 13 injured, including 10 foreign tourists and three Cubans, was the balance left by a traffic accident registered this Friday on the Circuito Sur highway, in the limits of Trinidad and Cienfuegos. the provincial newspaper Escambray confirmed that among foreign travelers French appear and Russians, who were heading to the Cienfuegos province after an excursion.
Denis Díaz Peláez, secretary of the Communist Party in Trinidad, assured the official newspaper that the passengers were traveling on a Transgaviota bus. The driver of the vehicle, when trying to avoid a tanker, lost control. However, Díaz Peláez assured that “the precise causes” of the accident are “still being investigated.”
The local press detailed that the injured were transferred to the General Hospital of Trinidad Tomás Carrera Galiano, until there were ambulances available to take the most seriously injured to an assistance center in the city of Sancti Spíritus.
Luis Sáez, director of Public Health in Trinidad, assured that among the patients there are three with a red code: a tourist with a picture of simple head trauma and another with a muscular bone tear in the left hand. The third is a Cuban citizen who suffered a head injury, a multiple fracture in his left arm, a muscle tear, and injuries to the great vessels.
The rest of the passengers, Sáez assured, are with minor injuries and out of danger. Escambray reported that “minutes after the fact was known” the authorities of the Communist Party and the Ministry of the Interior in Trinidad went to the hospital.
The injured were transferred to the General Hospital of Trinidad, until there were ambulances available to take the most seriously injured to an assistance center in Sancti Spíritus.
In Cuba, the coverage of vehicle insurance policies is very low, despite the fact that in 2020 the Council of State approved a mandatory resolution for all professional drivers. The newspaper Invader reported this week that in Ciego de Ávila only 6,321 drivers -equivalent to 30% of the total registered in the province- have complied with the norm and have some type of coverage.
The newspaper acknowledges that the non-compliance is “serious” because the drivers had a period of 180 days to sign a policy as a guarantee against damages or material losses that they could cause to the passengers of their vehicles. Invasor recalls that this regulation is preceded by the increase in accidents in Cuba, which in 2019 were 25 accidents as a daily average and by 2022 it increased to 27.
The National Traffic Commission reports that at the end of 2022, 9,848 accidents were registered where 700 people lost their lives and 7,547 were injured. In addition, the newspaper recalls that, according to official data, only 2% of the million and a half drivers with a driver’s license in Cuba have an insurance policy.
Maylin Tibau Alfonso, deputy director of the National Insurance Company (ESEN) in Ciego de Ávila, told the official media that the insured’s coverage includes compensation of 101,000 to 900,000 pesos, according to the premium paid by the insured, whose minimum fee is 300 and the maximum is 2,250 pesos.
A policy includes coverage for a person who was economically dependent on someone who died in an accident, added the official, although she clarified that the right is lost if it is proven that the driver ingested alcoholic beverages or psychotropic substances, that his driver’s license was suspended or that he the vehicle would have been used for a crime.
Tibau Alfonso also attributed the low coverage to the fact that institutions tend to hire non-professional drivers, who are not required to sign a policy.
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