The Cuban boy José Camilo Milo Cateura Díaz will be able to receive adequate treatment for her leukemia in the US, after being granted a humanitarian visa on Thursday. Cateura, 11, will be treated at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, reported The New Herald.
At the moment, the boy is still admitted to the Havana Institute of Hematology, where he has received several platelet transfusions that are essential for his body to remain stable during the trip to Florida. Milowho will be accompanied by his father, Jesús Cateura, has his immigration documents in order, but his state of health has not allowed him, for the moment, to board the plane.
The Cateura Díaz family requested the parole humanitarian aid for the child last October, but the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (Uscis) resolved the case this week. The delay caused the patient’s state of health to worsen. The doctors in Havana had to subject him to three very invasive treatments, which triggered bleeding from the mouth and nose in Milo.
“I thought it was going to be fast. That he would leave the hospital from here to the hospital there,” lamented his mother, Judith Díaz Valentí, interviewed by The New Herald. Her certainty was based on the criteria of the immigration lawyer Zulimary Maymi-Serrano, who is the legal mediator between the Cateura Díaz and Uscis. Cases like that of Milohe believes, must be resolved “quickly to preserve the integrity and health of the child.”
“The disease increases your resistance, that’s the worry you have when it takes everything”
USCIS guaranteed the resolution of the case within the usual waiting range –between 90 and 120 days–, the lawyer points out, but in practice, it was too delicate a period for the well-being of the child and the price of the delay was paid.
“The disease increases your resistance, that’s the worry you have when it takes everything,” was the opinion from Dr. Guillermo de Angulo, the doctor who will take care of Cateura in Miami. The doctor assures that “the waiting time endangered the child’s life.” At Nicklaus Children’s Hospital they will discuss the current status of the child’s disease. The intention is to achieve her remission in about 30 days and perform a bone marrow transplant three months later.
While the father and son travel to Miami, his mother and brother will remain in Cuba. The separation, the family assures, causes them fear. Cateura was diagnosed with leukemia in 2020 and her treatment in Cuba did not have satisfactory results, so the family chose to seek help in Miami. From Florida, Dr. De Angulo pointed out that Havana did not meet the conditions to care for the child and that they lacked the “tools to put him in complete remission.”
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