There is no saline solution in hospitals and surgeries have been suspended because staff have been infected with the virus.
14ymedio, Miguel García, 14 November 2025 — The health situation in Holguín is critical and shows no signs of improving. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, arbovirus infections are multiplying, without people being clear whether they are suffering from chikungunya or dengue, the two main diseases that have spread across the island. Only some of the symptoms help you identify them: if the joints hurt, it will be the former; if there is severe vomiting, the latter.
“Almost everyone in my block has been sick already. Just yesterday, they took my cousin to the Clinical Surgical Hospital,” says Sandra, a resident of Holguín. “He’s big and strong, but he fainted from dehydration, and when he got to the hospital, they didn’t even have any IV fluids.” The same thing is happening at the city’s paediatric hospital and at Lenin Hospital. Each bag of saline solution has become a luxury item: it can be found on the informal market on Calle 13 for 3,000 pesos.
Another resident of Holguín says the same thing: “People are becoming dehydrated and nothing is being done about it. Many people go to the doctor and they are sent away, only getting advice to boil cherry leaves. At the hospital, unless they are seriously ill, they are not treated.” Talking about this, he tells us about an acquaintance who, 12 days after contracting “the virus,” experienced worsening symptoms and was becoming dehydrated. “She had to send her son to buy her IV fluids and find a nurse in the neighbourhood to administer them at home. People aren’t going to the hospital because they know there is nothing there.”
“No special favours, there’s no way we can operate under these conditions!”
We are also seeing the beginning a shortage of doctors. At Lenin Hospital, according to a nurse employed there, “they are not performing surgeries because most of the specialists are ill with arbovirosis.” Workers saw the director of the centre, Dr Amalia Pupo Zúñiga, standing at the door of a room and warning: “No favours, there is no way we can do that!” Favours, in Cuban medical slang, are the favours that health workers do on the side: for friendship, family relationships or in exchange for a gift.
Several Holguin residents also claim to know of people dying, an issue that the government keeps quiet about, despite the fact that funeral homes and cemeteries in the country are clearly busier than usual. The Holguín authorities have admitted, however, that the epidemiological situation, especially after Hurricane Melissa, has worsened in the territory. “Many people are currently suffering from joint pain, feverish symptoms, loss of appetite, restricted mobility and general malaise,” according to a note published on Friday in Ahora!
Geanela Cruz Ávila, director of the Provincial Centre for Hygiene and Epidemiology, told the government newspaper that tests confirm the circulation of dengue serotype four and chikungunya in Holguín.
The official didn’t say much about the measures taken by Public Health to control the situation. She merely stated that last week the Provincial Defence Council approved a “strategy” to combat arboviruses following the passage of Melissa, which includes investigations in communities and home medical care, as well as the destruction of “breeding sites that appear in homes and other premises in order to stop the appearance of mosquitoes, mainly in their larval stage”.
The poisons that are normally used, malathion and permethrin, have a very strong and distinctive smell.
The note says nothing about fumigation, but some residents claim that it is “sporadic and isolated”. For example, Sandra says: “They know about the positive cases in the neighbourhood and they haven’t come to fumigate, as they did before with dengue. According to them, it’s because they don’t have any fuel”.
The lady also does not know whether these occasional fumigations are effective. “The poisons that are normally used, malathion and permethrin, have a very strong, characteristic smell, and when you walk past one of these brigades, you don’t smell any of that,” she explains. “I don’t know what they’re actually spraying, or whether it works.”
On Wednesday, the national director of epidemiology, Francisco Durán García, in a special programme on the country’s health situation, stated that at least 30% of the population has been infected at some point with one of the arboviruses that have spread across the island, dengue or chikungunya.
Although the former carries a higher risk of death, people are currently more fearful of chikungunya, as it is a relatively new virus in Cuba, transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same vector that transmits dengue and Zika. María Guadalupe Guzmán Tirado, director of the Research, Diagnosis and Reference Centre at the Pedro Kourí Institute, gave detailed explanations about this disease that is keeping the island in check, as its symptoms can take up to three months to disappear and the joint pains are very severe.
Translated by GH
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