The doctor’s breakdown in tears last Monday Yoandra Quesada from Bayamo (Granma), who is being tried along with five other colleagues for the death of a 23-year-old patient, is nothing but the living image of what remains of health in Cuba, an eternal jewel in the crown for revolutionary propaganda .
What the surgeon expressed to journalist Ernesto Morales – “all your colleagues are leaving, you are working alone and without materials, exposed to being killed one day by a desperate relative” – is verified day by day by any Cuban who sets foot in a health center. . And the situation of primary services is especially dramatic.
“There are no syringes, there are no reagents for analysis, there are no nozzles to give aerosol, there are no sphygmos to take the blood pressure.” Aleida, who recounts this litany, is still young, but is beginning to have problems with hypertension, a condition that leads to the leading cause of death on the Island. “One day when I arrived with high blood pressure at the hospital, they wanted to give me oxygen, but there were no nozzles, so the doctor gave me the hose and told me: ‘don’t put it in your mouth, put it close, so you can feel the oxygen.'” Aleida couldn’t do it, because of the stench that the instrument gave off and out of embarrassment. “I picked it up and told him: look, this doesn’t smell good. But also, I felt ridiculous, with that oxygen escaping everywhere.”
That day, he was lucky, because he usually has to walk miles and wander through several centers before finding one where a device to measure blood pressure is available. “The first time I went to the polyclinic that is near my house, where there are no shifts sphygmos“The doctor told me: ‘I can’t take your blood pressure, baby, but come and sit here, the only thing I can give you is a tooth.'”
“There are no syringes, there are no reagents for analysis, there are no nozzles to give aerosol, there are no ‘sphygmos’ to take blood pressure”
Who does have sphygmometers? “They have foreign residents there many times, always with more pleasant treatment than the Cubans, by the way,” Aleida asserts. Faced with the exodus of specialists, outside the Island or towards other jobs that provide them with better earnings, the Government is trying to resolve the lack of labor with exchange students, who cover the guard corps.
Luis, who at 40 is not old either, is scared. He has been urinating blood for a few weeks and they still haven’t given him the results of the tests that he finally dared to do. He was not successful the first time he went to the hospital because “they didn’t have reagents”, but he was successful the second time. “But then I had to carry the syringe, because they didn’t have any either.” Now, he anxiously awaits his appointment with the specialist: in eight months.
Minor illnesses and once luxury centers are not spared from the debacle. The 19 de Abril polyclinic in Nuevo Vedado, for example, the favorite place to take foreign visitors on an official trip to the Island, has serious infrastructure problems.
“Cracks at a 45-degree angle in several important walls, even cracks that can be seen on one side and the other of a window,” observes Juan, who for many years was dedicated to construction and recently had to go to that health center. to do rehabilitation for a dislocation. “The building was built during the Revolution, so it is not more than 65 years old.”
The wave of indignation over the trial of the six doctors at the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes hospital, accused of negligence, not only caused a reaction to the Ministry of Public Healthwhich had to clarify that the process is developed “in accordance with the guarantees established in the laws,” but that it continues to have echoes.
Faced with the exodus of specialists, the Government is trying to resolve the lack of manpower with exchange students, who cover the guard corps
Thus, in the midst of the controversy, the Cuban Communist Party in Granma decided this Wednesday to dismiss its first secretary, Yanaisi Capó Nápoles, and put Yudelkis Ortiz Barceló in his place. The official press did not detail the reasons and highlighted Ortiz Barceló that he comes from being a member of the Executive Bureau to “attend to the political-ideological activity” in the Provincial Committee of the PCC in Santiago de Cuba.
This Wednesday, four doctors residing abroad signed a harsh letter addressed to José Ángel Portal Miranda, Minister of Health, in which they express their solidarity with the “unfairly accused” doctors. The letter, signed by Alexander Jesús Figueredo Izaguirre, Arnoldo de la Cruz Bañoble, Sergio Barbolla Verdecia and Jorge David Yaugel, describes what happened in Bayamo as a “national shame.”
“The accusers should – do they know this? – point out those truly responsible for that death. These doctors are also victims of the conflict between their professional commitment and the impossibility of succeeding in the conditions in which they are forced to intervene on their patients,” the doctors express in the text. For them, “those responsible for diverting the resources provided by the medical brigades” should appear before the courts.
They are, they point out, “billions of dollars” that the regime has received in the last decade, money that “has not been invested in the Cuban health system as was argued at the time to justify the arbitrary deduction of between 70% to 90% of the salaries of the brigade members during all these years”. With this, they continue, “there would have been enough to keep the health system in optimal conditions and pay decent salaries to professionals in the sector.”
“These doctors are also victims of the conflict between their professional commitment and the impossibility of being successful in the conditions in which they are forced to intervene on their patients”
Among their demands is that from now on they pay health workers “the entire salary when we go out to provide services to other countries and not that they give us a minimum stipend of the same”, as well as an “immediate” salary increase for all those who work within the Health system.
He also spoke about the case Amelia Calzadillawho from Spain, where he managed to leave just over two weeks ago, asks that doctors refuse to work in the terrible conditions in which they work.
She is not the only one who thinks this way on the island. “What the situation calls for is a general strike, what happens is that if you say this in public they put you in jail,” she laments… The woman, who does not want to give more details of him, he predicts: “One day everything is going to stop working, the doctors are not going to go to the hospital to work, the teachers are not going to go to school, the winemakers are not going to tend to the wineries, and then it is going to collapse is coming. Because if there is nothing anywhere, what’s the point of all this?
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