Hit by shortages of food, medicine and electricity, Cubans now find themselves in the middle of a health crisis resulting from the “virus”, a disease that plagues the island with symptoms ranging from high fever, red spots on the skin, vomiting, diarrhea and headache. And it doesn’t stop there: after the swelling of the hands and knees, there are those who cannot support the soles of their feet, leaving them unable to walk.
“If someone limps, it is most likely that they had the virus. If they drag their legs, they had the virus. If they complain about their joints, they also got sick,” the newspaper indicates. The Country.
For several years, Cuba has been suffering from an economic crisis that has constantly worsened due to various factors, such as economic obstacles, inflationary pressures, shortages of medicines and supplies, and the growing migration of health personnel, which have overloaded the Cuban health system and collectively impacted the well-being and health of the population.
And, according to the newspaper The Wall Street Journalthe situation is about to get worse. This is because the United States is intensifying pressure on Havana’s main benefactor, the Nicolás Maduro regime, which has kept the communist nation afloat thanks to cheap oil. Now, Venezuelan oil exports are at risk due to a partial blockade of sanctioned tankers, which transport around 70% of the country’s crude oil.
The “virus” Cubans refer to is actually the simultaneous spread of three arboviruses or mosquito-borne viruses – dengue, chikungunya and oropouche – on the island, according to the Cuban government and the World Health Organization/Pan American Health Organization (WHO/PAHO). Added to these are other respiratory viruses such as Covid, as explained by epidemiological authorities in state media.
According to figures published by the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), at the beginning of this month 5,717 new cases of chikungunya were reported, bringing the number of patients with this virus to 38,938. Regarding dengue, they reported that it remains active in the 14 provinces and 113 municipalities of the country.
Health authorities recognize at least 47 deaths from arboviruses, although experts and activists believe that many others are not recorded or the government attributes them to other causes, so the number could be much higher.
Sources consulted by BBC Mundo claim to know of several close cases of deaths due to the “virus” in recent months.
On the other hand, the infant mortality rate has increased by 85%, from 4 per 1,000 live births in 2018 (the lowest level recorded in the country’s history) to an estimated 7.4 per 1,000, according to the United Nations.
The number of new chikungunya infections grew by 71% in just 7 days, as indicated last week by the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, while PAHO estimated the total number of cases of this disease at 25,995.
However, a large part of the sick refuse to go to medical centers if they are not very serious, so the real number is unknown.
“There are many children one month old who have died, also between 2 and 4 years old, in addition to many young people, because the vomiting and diarrhea dehydrate them, they arrive at the hospital already collapsed,” he told the newspaper. The Country on condition of anonymity, a worker from the Institute of Hematology and Immunology of El Vedado.
In a report this year from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) it is noted that “in the midst of the dengue and oropouche epidemics throughout the country, the risk of outbreaks of communicable diseases remains high due to prolonged flooding, lack of access to drinking water and poor hygiene in temporary shelters for the evacuated population. In addition, this situation increases the probability of outbreaks of digestive, respiratory and other vector-borne diseases.”
“Although the health system has been able to maintain health services and epidemiological surveillance to a certain extent with existing resources and trained personnel, there is a shortage of laboratory reagents and supplies for diagnosis, antibiotics and other medications for treatment, as well as basic supplies for the operation of health services,” he adds.
“Zombie City”
“Matanzas today seems like a city of zombies… that’s how we walk, bent over, in pain. Just go out into the street and look,” journalist Yirmara Torres Hernández wrote a few weeks ago in a message on social media that was reproduced by several media outlets. The stories that come from the island speak of feverish patients, bent over and with movement problems as a result of the epidemic, indicates the BBC Mundo network.
The diary The Country tells the story of an 81-year-old woman who last October began to feel bad and was completely hunchbacked. Her family took her to the hospital and, based on her physical condition, the doctor deduced that it was chikungunya. A week later his diabetes, blood pressure and tachycardia decompensated. “We took her to the doctor twice, they looked at her and just checked her vital signs,” says her son Alexander Hernández.
A few days later the doctors told him that everything was under control, that he could return home. On November 5, he died. Hernández asked for an autopsy but the doctor refused. “He said no, and I didn’t insist either because there was no transportation, he practically convinced me that it was for pleasure,” he told the newspaper. His mother’s death certificate says that she lost her life due to natural death.
In Cuban hospitals, says Silvia – who spoke with BBC Mundo – “there are no conditions to have people. Everything is collapsed, including pediatric hospitals. There is no diagnosis as such; they only send hydration, acetaminophen, paracetamol for joint pain.”
“The truth is, what we are experiencing is very precarious. People are simply spending it in their homes as best they can, practically without walking, typical of the pain,” he indicates.
A 50-year-old professor from Havana assures, also from anonymity, that “the fewest” go to medical centers after falling ill.
“Almost everyone I know doesn’t go. People choose not to go because in those institutions there is no way to get a safe diagnosis and there are no medications either. You have to buy them on the informal market, or have a family member or friend send them from outside, or have someone who lives here give them to you,” he says.
The worsening of the endemic economic crisis that the country is suffering today places its health system in extremely precarious conditions. Public health experts say Cuba’s long-standing mosquito control and fumigation programs have failed due to shortages of fuel, insecticides and funding.
Most hospitals are completely short of equipment, materials and medications, which prevents them from offering the minimum medical and hygienic conditions to care for patients. The diary The Country points out that many people self-medicate with medicinal plants, due to the absence of drugs in a country where 70% of the remedies that the population needs are missing, which corresponds to more than 460 drugs that are not currently available in pharmacies and state health centers.
Even basic items such as syringes, gauze and antibiotics are increasingly difficult to obtain, while obsolete machines break down for lack of spare parts.
“What worries Cubans most today is the lack of reagents in health institutions that can confirm, with certainty, what type of virus they are suffering from,” says the Spanish newspaper.
Added to this is that thousands of Cuban doctors have emigrated abroad with the exodus of recent years, leaving collapsed services on the island, unfilled shifts and a chronic overload of personnel who work under strong pressure for salaries that are around US$30 per month at the real exchange rate.
More than 2.7 million people – about a quarter of the island’s population, many of them young and ambitious – have fled the island since 2020, hundreds of thousands of them to the United States, according to the calculations of a Havana-based demographer, Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos.
“What Cuba is experiencing – a phenomenon that I call demographic emptying– it is nothing less than a humanitarian disaster that is only seen in countries in armed conflict,” he stated.
Almost 90% of the Cuban population lives in extreme poverty, and 70% do not eat at least once a day, according to the Social Rights Observatory, a think tank that conducted a month of surveys last summer. For more than 70% of Cubans, their main concerns are lack of food and constant blackouts, which can last 18 hours or more a day in some regions. The observatory revealed that 78% intend to flee the island.
