Miami/Sitting on folding chairs, with umbrellas, coffee glasses and sunglasses, dozens of clients waited this Thursday morning in front of one of the offices of the Cubamax agency, in Miami, to send a package to their family on the Island. health crisis that hits the Cuban territory shapes everything from what is bought in the markets of the Cuban exile capital to the contents of those boxes that travel 90 miles by boat or plane.
“I have two bottles of mosquito repellent, several packets of citronella incense to keep bugs away, and fever medication,” he lists. 14ymedio Gladys, 66 years old, who has only been in the United States for three years. With numerous relatives suffering from dengue and chikungunya, the woman tried to send several boxes loaded with medicines, food and all kinds of products to ward off the Aedes aegyptithe mosquito that has put the Cuban Public Health system in check.
Residents in San Miguel del Padrón, Gladys’s relatives have been “not leaving one to enter another for weeks,” the woman warns. “The children started and now the oldest people in the house are also infected, the one who is having the worst time is my cousin who is diabetic, hypertensive and has heart disease.” To complete the long list of needs and requests, the immigrant visited several supermarket chains: Sedano, Navarro, Fresco, Costco, Publix and even Target. “In some places I arrived and they had run out of repellent sprays because they say people are buying too many to send to Cuba.”
The emergencies on the Island have ended up shaping commerce in Miami
The emergencies on the Island have ended up shaping commerce in Miami. In the weeks prior to the start of the teaching year on the island, the demand for school uniforms multiplies in stores that have seen an economic boon in the sale of these mandatory clothing items in Cuban classrooms. If national coffee production plummets and the rationing quota takes a while to arrive, emigrants go there to purchase La Llave, Bustelo and other cheaper brands to send as soon as possible to Havana or Camagüey.
Next to Gladys, a young man spoke at length this Thursday about the merchandise he would send when, after a long line, he could enter the air-conditioned office. “I brought a cane to my mother who has a knee that is very swollen due to the virus and can hardly take a step. I also included some anti-diarrhea medication and a product to purify the water that is getting very dirty.” He will complete the box, which weighs about 44 pounds and which, under a special offer, currently costs $45 for shipping, with cans of sardines, powdered milk and “a nebulizer device for a great-uncle, who suffers from asthma, and on top of that he has oropouche.”
Oral rehydration salts, ointments to soothe joint pain, compounds for nausea and a long list of drugs to relieve headaches were also accumulated in the packages that accompanied clients. With each person who managed to enter the office and send their package, a family in Cuba saw the light of relief at the end of the tunnel of the health collapse.
