14ymedio.com

The situation is very serious.  Covid-19 has taken nine lives on this island, while 350 people have tested positive for the disease and 8 patients remain in critical condition while four are seriously ill, according to official data. Said like this, they only seem like numbers, but in reality they are lives abruptly terminated and people who died, in the majority of cases, without being abe to say goodbye to their families.

How many were infected while standing in line? It is difficult to specify, but the today in Cuba the lines are one of the main “risk areas.” The other danger is our own recklessness. The person who is not aware of the danger and continues to move through the streets without a sense of urgency, the one who believes that nothing will happen to him if he doesn’t wash his hands frequently and the one who insists that the consumption of supplements will prevent him from getting sick.

The Santiago de Cuba government-run newspaper, Sierra Maestra, is one of those that promotes natural supplements to avoid contagion. Under the title “Tablets of Anamu vs coronavirus,” this local medium says that it is “a drug that stimulates the production of interferon in the body, an essential protein to combat the presence of various pathogens such as viruses, in this case effective against Covid-19.”

The most dangerous thing about this information, similar to the announcement of homeopathic drops promoted by the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) to “prevent contagion,, is that it comes from an official source and is endorsed by the almighty State. That someone wants to use these “therapies” as a personal decision is one thing, it is another for them to be promoted as effective in a country where a public debate on their relevance in this case has not been allowed.

Reading, researching and searching for information can prevent us from falling into the clutches of false illusions and supposed miraculous cures. One of the few positive things about this pandemic is that many of my friends and acquaintances have returned to reading, after years when finishing a book was almost impossible due to lack of time and exhaustion at the end of the workday. So, at least, let’s enjoy the books!

Today I returned to the pages of The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer, a book that takes on special meaning at the moment. My philologist colleague describes in this volume how the fascist regime exalted a rhetoric in which all the products that came out of their industries were shown as “the most modern,” “the most efficient,” “the most powerful.” It immediately reminded me of the headlines in Cuba’s national press these days.

Meanwhile, in the real dimension of life everything is less grandiose but certainly more extraordinary. The pepper seeds I sowed have sprouted on my balcony, the new dog that we picked up from the street has already destroyed her first shoe, and every day that we wake up without breathing problems we celebrate, without triumphalism but with joy.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

To make matters worse, from the initial arrogance of believing that the virus was not going to affect us in Cuba as it does in other countries, officialdom has moved towards the stage of searching for the holy grail of healing. And having exhausted the hoax of the supposed effectiveness of the interferon alfa 2B is produced on the Island, that have moved on to a homeopathic solution. It would be laughable if it were not so dramatic, because we have already reached eight dead and 320 infected, according to official figures.

In a recent press conference, Francisco Durán, national director of Hygiene and Epidemiology of the Ministry of Public Health, promised that Prenvengho-Vir, a preventive homeopathic medicine, will begin to be applied on the Island as a “prophylactic measure” to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus. The doctor stressed that this product helps prevent different conditions such as influenza, respiratory diseases, dengue, and emerging viral diseases or infections.

There are many serious researchers who consider homeopathy a false therapy. Although in our universities they even teach it and our health system includes it in therapeutic guides, all this is done without a scientific endorsement. Right now, speaking out against homeopathy in the Cuban Academy of Medicine is practically looking for a political problem.

In the current situation, when it is taking so long to raise awareness about the need to maintain social isolation, it seems dangerous to me to speak of prophylactic homeopathic therapy. “Don’t worry if in a few days we have a little drop,” a retiree in my building said when I went to throw out the trash today. “This is the greatest, you take it and it protects you from dengue or the flu,” he assured me. I ran scared before he wanted to make me try some concoction.

When I returned, I remembered that Sundays are cleaning days at home, whether or not we are in quarantine. But today, plans to wash, mop the floor, and give the kitchen a once over were put off until further notice. The water supply problem has gotten worse and we have to save every drop, so cleaning was reduced to the stove, a broom over the floor, and a brief swiping of dust from the furniture.

The few informal vendors that haunt the neighborhood no longer want to enter buildings. They advertise their merchandise from the street and when someone asks them to come upstairs they refuse. Today, from a window on the 14^th floor, Reinaldo yelled at the top of his lungs at an informal onion vendor who was walking down the street. The shout served to guarantee our meals will be seasoned and incidentally proved to us that Reinaldo’s lung capacity is still good.

The applause at nine o’clock at night has been gradually perverted. What started in Cuba as a citizen initiative, heir to other similar ones in Italy and Spain, has ended up hijacked by officialdom. It is not surprising, but already in our neighborhood, newly voices, recently raised, try to impose political slogans on the ovation, drown the “thank you” dedicated to the doctors with cheers for the Revolution and Díaz-Canel. Regrettable.

So today, at nine o’clock at night, I will choose to recite some verses. On behalf of my sick poet friend in Madrid. For my neighbor who believes in the strength of homeopathic drops, I will have to invoke the complete Vademecum.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

I think about him, in an place of isolation where he cannot offer attention, but receives it, and it makes me sad. As a journalist, when I imagine a situation in which I couldn’t report what is happening, the feeling I get is thoughts of impotence. The forced and necessary quarantine is not just a hard blow for the economy and mobility of a country, but also for the professions that need to be in contact with people and with reality.

So among my great proccupations, along with the health of my loved ones and my own, is the situation of people like my medical friend who has become a patient and that of so many independent reporters that I know for whom the emergency has significantly reduced their ability to work, while the repression does not spare them. There is no scheduled applause at nine o’clock every day for the press, but it turns out that without them we would know little or nothing about the sacrifice of doctors, the agony of the sick or the resilience of societies.

Personally, today I have dedicated a brief tribute to all those journalists who keep us updated. It has not been complicated, because from the time I get up, my coffee has the flavor of reporting, my life revolves around the news and up to eight out of ten calls that come into our telephone line are from someone who wants to report an event fact, a mishap or get details of some happening. Our professional life is totally merged with our personal space.

On this 14th floor we try to stay healthy for our family and for our readers. Industries stop, roads empty, discos close their doors but who could imagine a world without news right now. We have a tough challenge and an immense responsibility: Who is going to tell us what is happening?

Years ago, when my son was young, I realized that as long as I had to take care of him, I hardly got sick. If any discomfort came, it would last me a few hours, hardly a day. I understood that when you are aware that you are looking out for someone else or others, it helps to strengthen us, at least emotionally and mentally to overcome adversities. It does not mean that we become invulnerable or immune, but that we learn to cope with difficulties knowing that someone urgently needs us to be healthy.

Readers are anything but children or patients, anything but vulnerable beings, anything but people who depend on us journalists. But while they are there with their voracity for information, their criticism of each of our reports, their harsh opinions when we are wrong and their words of encouragement when we are right, getting sick in a newsroom is something that we can hardly afford.

Today the onion that I planted a few days ago on the terrace of the Editorial Office has sprouted, we have named the new dog Chiqui because she is still small although she threatens to become Maxi, and we ate the last egg we had left from rationing. “We are breathing, no one with a fever, no one with a cough,” we optimistically respond to all the friends who call.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

That was such a used dramatic image, that in my childish mind, outside of Cuba people were always one step away from being carried away on a stretcher, seeing their house burn down or being arrested. A small sonic detail became effective ideological propaganda to tell us that it was better to be inside the Island, safeguarded by that authoritarian father who is Castroism.

Maybe that’s why, now, when I hear sirens again and again, I have a feeling that reality is collapsing around me. If we add to this that the city is quieter than usual, the alarms are more prominent and seem even more dramatic. In a country where, as of today, official figures count 269 positive cases for Covid-19 and six in critical condition, there are reasons to be concerned.

This Friday I did not have to leave home. I made some croquettes, I stretched the rice I got yesterday and some carrots, also bought on Thursday in a nearby market, saved me and I could make a very tasty sauce. The canine and feline herd had to settle for a “vegetarian” proposal and one of the onions I planted a few days ago began to sprout. Life goes on, even though the city is sunk in lethargy.

The paralysis of transportation, the closure of many industries and some of the services, has meant that this morning we woke up with a clear and beautiful sky… at least in apart of the Cuban capital. Towards the south, the airport area and Santiago de las Vegas, it looked blue and clear, but in the direction of Central Havana, Old Havana and the Bay a cloud of smoke covered the city.

The Ñico López refinery continues to spread a dark stain over the neighborhoods as a result of the processing of hydrocarbons. In a territory where other industries are idled, that language of contamination is much more noticeable. That and the sound of sirens.

I continued planting this afternoon, attentive to the noises coming from the balcony. Today, I added some coriander seeds and also transplanted some positions of aloe vera, known in Cuba as sábila, which is the species of which we have the most specimens on this 14th floor balcony. The plants will germinate, grow and we will harvest them with that ” musical band,” with the background sound of anguish.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

A crowd rushed in front of me. I tried to invoke the times when I fought, nearly coming to blows for food, but I did not succeed. I lacked the oomph. My neighbors in the Cayo Hueso tenement where I was born would disown me if I told them this. I even invoked my years, in the middle of the Special Period, when I was a boarder at the Socialist Republic of Romania High School and lived many days in which the “law of the strongest” prevailed, but today I did not manage to release my inner beast.

In the girls’ dorm where I lived in the 90s, we invented a lot of recipes to survive. I remember the day I stole an eggplant from the field where we worked and, after cutting it into slices, I put the electric iron on it, the one we used to remove wrinkles from our school uniforms. I added lemon and coriander. It was delicious. My classmates, who slept in the nearby bunks, called this “generation Y grilled steak,” in honor of the letter with which most names began at that time. That was the embryo of a blog that I founded years later.

Only he who has been hungry knows what hunger is. It is not just the howling in the stomach, the anxiety and the weakness caused by a decrease in one’s food intake. Hunger is an attitude and an emotional state: if you lack food, it is all you can think about it over and over, as happened to me and my fellow teenagers between the four walls of a concrete block in the municipality of Alquízar. Neither libido nor family mattered, we woke up and fell asleep thinking about what to put in our mouths.

Many in Cuba have spent decades feeling hunger, but all this can flare up now. Something as basic as chicken has become a luxury product. The Covid-19 crisis has only just begun on the Island, with 233 positive cases and six deaths, but according to what we read, the problem of access to food is already more serious than in the epicenters of the pandemic which Milan, Madrid and New York have become. They are living through dramatic days from the health point of view, but in our case with regards to the emergency in supplies, it’s out of the frying pan into the fire.

I no longer have an iron. Years ago I stopped trying to smooth out my clothes. Is it of any use? But today I remembered the eggplants that I ironed out in a dorm with narrow beds where nobody dared to sleep in the lower bunks because at night rats invaded all the spaces attached to the floor. Once I left some shoes and books down below and they’d been nibbled in the morning. After remembering that, I repeated to myself that I could face almost anything.

It does not matter if I am wearing a red wig and a mask that covers my entire face, I am a survivor, because I say so; all that’s left to see is what the last word is that the coronavirus has for me.

*Translator’s note: “Durako” refers to a kind of cosplay popular among young Cubans.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

When I was a child I liked to go to the May Day parades with my parents. In addition to the hustle and bustle and general tumult, I loved some natural juices that were distributed for free to the participants and that, if memory serves me correctly, we called Jupuro. Once a year I had the chance to drink that nectar that came in a waxed cardboard box, all of which was a surprise to me, knowing nothing of tetrapacks and aluminum cans.

But later, the childhood enthusiasm passed and I realized that as a worker I was not going to be represented in a gathering that, instead of requests and demands, sings praises to power. When I graduated from university, for a long time I earned 198 CUP per month, less than $ 10, but I never saw a single poster in that “party of the proletariat” that demanded – in the Plaza of the Revolution – better salaries.

So I stopped going a long time ago and probably will only return to the parade on an International Workers’ Day when carrying a poster denouncing wage insecurity is not prohibited in Cuba and when the great boss, called the State, stops presenting itself as the savior of the working class. In reality, it earns huge capital gains, pays miserable wages, prohibits the right to strike, and condemns us to not even having a union to represent us.

Holding my proletarian diatribe within, today I worked on the flower boxes on my balcony. The potatoes are not yet germinating and they worry me, because all my hopes of having that tuber on my table in the coming weeks are pinned on my home garden. The plants that are beautiful are the flowers of my franchipani [plumeria rubra]. When I talk about the beauty of this shrub that stands on my balcony, most of my friends ask me “do you eat it?” and no, it is not eaten, but it is food for the soul, which is also essential in this time.

I haven’t felt well today. I don’t know if it’s the stress experienced in these “times of the coronavirus” or that the body starts to resent the tensions of waiting. Nothing worrying, just that these days any discomfort sets off the alarms and what was insignificant now becomes a suspicion.

But I’m fine. I write, I sow, I go out to buy food but, in addition, along with the diminished food that I get, I get stories: anecdotes, statements and even jokes that people want to share in extreme situations.

“This happens to us because we are alive, those over there no longer have this problem,” a flower vendor I found a few meters from the wall of Havana’s Colon Cemetery told me this morning. “Here we have coronaviruses, but in the ‘face-up neighborhood’ they would give anything to be on this side,” he emphasized with something that looked like a smile, but his facemask did not allow me to see it.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

This ability to do a lot with little is one of the strengths that Cuban doctors have exhibited in recent days to countries where the coronavirus is taking hundreds or thousands of lives. More than 40 nations have requested the support of the island’s health professionals, as reported by the Ministry of Public Health. A necessary request and, without a doubt, a wise decision, because they will receive doctors experienced in emergency situations.

However, it must be said that the fine print of these agreements between the Cuban Government and the countries that call for health personnel almost never makes headlines anywhere. Those doctors will provide their services in semi-slavery conditions because, of the money the hosts pay, only a tiny part will end up in their pockets.

Our self-sacrificing doctors will work, sweat, and risk their lives, but the biggest beneficiary will be a government that doesn’t show transparency about what is done with every centavo earned from medical missions. Although official voices repeat that this money is invested in improving national health facilities and services, there is no clear record and the same could go to save lives rather than to sustain the repression.

On the other hand, although the desire to heal is the main motivation of their work, these doctors will have to accept that their work is publicly dressed up in the robes of ideology. It is enough to see the images of the Cuban doctors before leaving for Italy, posing next to a portrait of Fidel Castro, to understand that their trip is also being used by the Plaza of the Revolution as a marketing operation. The authorities want to extract ideological revenue from the pandemic and spread the idea that an authoritarian model cuts freedoms but saves lives. In other words, in these regimes, it is not possible to behave oneself as a citizen, but rather as an eternal patient.

The official discourse is disrupted when one of those doctors decides not to return to the Island. From the smiling photo and the epithet “hero of the country” they will come to suffer the stigma of being considered a “deserter.” It is enough that a doctor fails to return from a mission for them to be forbidden to enter Island to be reunited with their family for eight long years and, in addition, they will lose the salary in national currency that they have already earned, which had been accumulating in a bank account in Cuba.

So why do they go to these missions where they risk their lives and where they earn so little, many will wonder. The answer is complex but worth exploring. The humanitarian vocation is part of the motivations, but there is more: Getting out of the island prison is a respite in the midst of such a hard daily life. Despite being in an emergency zone, over there they will have access to many more services and products, so they will be able to bring merchandise to Cuba that will relieve their situation and that of their family.

A few years ago I met a doctor, epidemiologist, and university professor, who accepted a medical mission in Venezuela because it was the only possibility of obtaining the resources to repair the roof of her house. On this island we have the harsh contrasts of running into a neurosurgeon who is going to operate on a brain without having had breakfast, because his salary is not enough to have a glass of milk each day, and of a nephrologist who asks his patients to buy him a snack to cope with the workday.

Despite the fact that some years ago the salary of health professionals became the highest pay in all of Cuba, right now it is very difficult to find any of them who earn more than the equivalent of 70 dollars a month, and this in a country where a liter of vegetable oil costs over $2.50 and in state stores a liter of milk costs more than $1.50. Our doctors live, practically, in penury.

All this and much more influences why they get on a plane to provide their professional services outside the country, even if they risk their lives and even though they know that the Government is going to keep most of their income. They also do it because they love their profession and one day they swore to face illness and death, because they are magnificent human beings, like all the doctors on the planet, and not because they profess an ideology or because they are members of a certain party.

They, our doctors, are the true heroes of these days and not because of what the official press says. So tonight, when the clock strikes nine, I will clap wildly for them on my balcony. I will do so to acknowledge their effort, but it will not be an ovation for the system that has condemned them to wage poverty and political docility. Come clap your hands for our white-coat heroes.

________________________

This text was originally published by Deustche Welle’s Latin America page.

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

I returned home with two cans of sardines and a package of flour. It is what it is. Tomorrow I will improvise some croquettes. The search for food, which has always had a special role in this country, now absorbs everything, concentrates everything, surpasses everything. From the time we wake up, our life revolves around getting food and putting it on our plates. There are two obsessions: surviving and feeding ourselves.

Even ideology seems to be fading. The demonstrations of political fervor that were so frequent a few weeks ago have been suspended or postponed. The May Day parade, in a country where the only union allowed is a transmission-line from the Power to workers, has also been canceled. Reinaldo says that he remembers something like that in 1970 when the 10 million ton sugar harvest was attempted. But I was not born yet.

Today we venture to make a family lunch and invite those relatives we suspect we will go weeks without seeing again. It was like saying goodbye but in advance. The table was the center that brought us back together and, of course, the coronavirus dominated the conversation. We speak of positive cases of the disease already reaching 186 in the country, according to official data, and that at least six people have lost their lives due to the pandemic.

Until a few days ago, those were people who shared a table with their family just as we did this Tuesday. They breathed, they had dreams and they loved, but it all ended abruptly. Understanding that fragility gives us a special strength to deal with all this, because you end up understanding the true human measure in the face of chance, disease and the environment.

Before sitting down to our plates, we all went through the rituals of handwashing, keeping our distance, and kisses that are now given only with the fingers or a gaze. We will be many days or weeks without seeing each other, but this Tuesday we decided that illness and shortages are not going to take away the memory of a lunch together.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.

He says he fought at the Bay of Pigs and that this virus was “created by the CIA.” He is neither an epidemiologist nor a doctor, but he is a fervent believer in what the national television news reports. Perhaps that is why, on Sunday night he went out onto his balcony to applaud the work of Cuban doctors, without knowing that the call for that ovation was something that had been forged in civil society and social networks, in tune with a similar gesture acted out days ago in Italy and Spain.

The clapping was heard loudly in our neighborhood, in honor of those Cubans who today are in hospitals facing Covid-19. A tough task in a country where official figures announce 170 confirmed cases of the disease and four deaths. Despite the context, there are always those who want to politically hijack the tribute to the doctors, but they are so ridiculous, and few, that they are drowned in the spontaneous applause.

Beyond those symbolic gestures, our lives change every day. It is not as if before we could use the adjective “normal” to define our existence, but it is that now the little that we felt safe in is gone or has changed. It is as if a building had its columns suddenly removed and the entire roof collapsed on its stunned residents.

If before, in order to define Cuba, it had to be emphasized that “without sugar there is no country,” now it is worth adding that “without the ‘weekly packet’” we could not guarantee that the nation that we knew until yesterday remained. For both skeptics and the credulous, it is worth announcing that since Monday the private store in our neighborhood that every week sold — religiously and without fail — that ubiquitous udiovisual compendium, has closed. It is not there, it’s gone… and we, thousands of addicts, are left in the lurch, literally staring at our blank screens.

In the afternoon, when the sun fell a little, I transplanted an oregano in the earth on my balcony, and a rosemary plant. “Rather dead than without spices,” I said to myself and touched my nose (for luck), that rare geography that the coronavirus has amputated for us because putting our fingers to our faces is a danger in these times.

Perhaps my militiaman neighbor, in partisan quarantine, will knock on my door in the next few days asking for some “flavor” to add to his food. I’ll be here. There are things that unite and tragedies are one of them.

See other posts in this series.

_______________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: In this time of Covid-19 crisis, 14ymedio could really use your help to keep the news coming. Please click on this link to support our work.