Perico (Matanzas)/It is difficult, if not practically impossible, to find a resident of Perico (60,000 inhabitants, 170 kilometers southeast of Havana) who does not know someone who has recently suffered from chikungunya. “On my block, almost everyone has had it,” is usually the response when residents talk about “that virus.”
In July, this municipality in the western province of Matanzas was the first focus in Cuba of an outbreak that already represents a “national” problem with “high rates,” as health authorities recognized this week. At first glance, the narrow streets of Perico, with its terraced houses, give an image of normality. Until the small details flourish: like people’s limp or others’ difficulty doing simple tasks like sitting.
Pedro Arturo Revilla, 66 years old, is one of them. He suffered the disease, as did “his entire family,” he tells EFE. He still suffers from the after-effects weeks later, such as intense joint pain and swelling in his ankles.
Next to her doorway, a 67-year-old diabetic and hypertensive woman interrupts the interview when she finds out that her neighbor is talking about chikungunya. “There is no fumigation here, which is why there should have been, with the number of mosquitoes that were here and the number of sick people there were. They don’t do anything here,” he says.
Chikungunya – which had not been present on the island for a decade – has joined dengue and oropouche, the former transmitted by the mosquito aedes aegypti and the third for the midge, in a perfect cocktail.
Carilda Peña García, Vice Minister of Public Health, regretted that massive fumigations cannot be carried out due to the fuel shortage in the country.
The outbreak has hit the country in the midst of a deep economic crisis, with a greatly reduced capacity to deal with diseases, their vectors and mosquito breeding sites, especially water leaks or liquids that accumulate in mountains of garbage that are not collected for weeks.
In an interview this week for state television, Carilda Peña García, vice minister of Public Health, regretted that massive fumigations cannot be carried out due to the fuel shortage in the country. However, he did assure that the Government has enough “insecticides” and “killers” to limit the damage.
He also stated that, unlike dengue, chikungunya It’s not a mortal threat.although it could worsen in patients with a previous health problem.
Raúl González, 63, has multiple sclerosis and went through the virus. While showing EFE his swollen ankles full of sores, he cracks a critical joke about the situation: “They should make another version of Thriller by Michael Jackson. “The extras are going to be free, everyone was walking like a zombie in the street.”
He, like many others, understands that the crisis has made the Government’s response a chimera. But he was furious at the way in which, in his opinion, the state media tried to downplay the seriousness of the matter.
“Apart from not saying what we really have… like everything is normal and there is nothing normal here. We have serious problems, and everyone knows that. The unhealthiness, the garbage that they don’t come to pick up… of course there are mosquitoes if they don’t fumigate! It makes me angry that they tell lies,” he says.
There is little point in going to a consultation because the doctor will limit himself to making the diagnosis by observation – in the absence of tests – to send them home to take medicines that can only be obtained on the black market.
To date, there is no updated public data on patients with chikungunya (present in eight of 15 provinces), dengue (active in 12 provinces) or oropouche in Cuba (also in 12). According to authorities, in 2025 three people diagnosed with dengue have died.
At the end of September, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a travel alert update due to the presence of chikungunya in Cuba.
About 55 kilometers from Perico, in the municipality of Cárdenas, the situation is very similar. For Beatriz Aguiar, 64, the outbreak “got out of Public Health’s hands.” Although the authorities have insisted that the health system is not even close to collapsing and that it has the capacity to deal with the situation, Aguiar saw something different: “You arrive at the hospital and the same doctors say that every day the number of cases that arrive is horrible, horrible.”
The reality, according to what a dozen residents between both municipalities told EFE, is that many infected people self-diagnose and pass the disease at home. Partly because the first hours of chikungunya are so hard that they leave the infected person bedridden. And also because, they insist, there is little point in going to a consultation because the doctor will limit himself to making the diagnosis by observation – in the absence of tests – to send them home to take medicines that can only be obtained on the black market and at exorbitant prices.
“It’s really not the authorities’ fault that they don’t know the real figures. But why are you going to go (to the doctor)? To be prescribed paracetamol every four hours, fluids and rest? There are many people who cannot buy even a blister of paracetamol, because it costs 500 pesos (almost a tenth of an average salary on the Island),” says Eneida Rodrígues, a resident of Cárdenas in her 60s.
