Category: Olea Gallardo

The first center mentioned on Monday by the official news agency (Chivatito) is the Covid-19 Installation Military Hospital created by the Ministry of Defense on one side of Los Pinos, the former presidential residence, where source who preferred to reserve his identity told 14ymedio at the time that at least 260 doctors were working in Mexico.

According to that source, these were housed “in units without being able to leave them, they sleep in bunks, and were divided into three brigades,” and two of them deserted.

The group that returned this Monday is the third group of those deployed in December to have returned to Cuba: a first contingent (of 160) did so on March 1 and another (of 95), two weeks later.

The sending of Henry Reeve brigades to Mexico has been characterized by controversy and opacity. On March 15, it was learned that the Mexican Government had paid one and a half million dollars more than what it had originally said (about six million) for 585 health workers on the island who had been working between April and July 2020.

The information was provided to the Mexican digital medium La Silla Rota only through a request to the transparency portal InfoCDMX — to which public institutions are, in principle, obliged to respond by law — and after a wait of half a year.

That they have been housed in military institutions has made it more difficult to learn about the ’mission’ that began in December. In theory, the Ministry of Defense is subject to the same rules when it comes to requesting information via transparency, but in practice, the authorities often refuse to provide it, alleging national security reasons.

Another thing happened in June of last year, when complaints about the work carried out by Cubans in hospitals in the Mexican capital came to light both on social networks and in the main Mexican newspapers.

For the rest, it remains unknown how much Mexico paid for the almost 200 healthcare workers that were stationed in Veracruz on the same dates or for the 500 that it imported in December, of which 378 have already returned to Cuba.

It is also unknown which government agency made the disbursement. The response to La Silla Rota, via transparency, named the Ministry of Health of the Mexican capital, but at the time, both the owner, Oliva López Arellano, and the head of Government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, emphasized that Cubans were hired “through an agreement with Insabi,” the Health and Welfare Institute created by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which has been the target of numerous criticisms in the country.

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Heria explains that if the priests stay in the diaspora, they do so because “they are tired of living under two types of dictatorships: the ecclesiastical and the governmental,” and he thanks Father Alberto Reyes “for making clear what this priest (me) has been telling the Cuban bishops, that it is their fallacy, regarding you, the priests, with the odor of sheep, who are the only hope of a noble people who wait, wait and wait for their freedom and respect for their dignity of being.”

The letter ends with an appeal to the 17 Cuban bishops, both ordinary and emeritus, to shout “enough is enough” and ask that they “set our noble Cuban people free for the love of God and the country.”

In his publication last Sunday, Father Alberto Reyes lamented suffering “the silence of my bishops.”

“It is not true that the Church has not spoken, it is not true, because all of us are the Church, and many lay people, priests, religious, even a bishop speaking personally, we have said what we think and we continue to say it,” the priest continued. And he clearly stated, “This country needs a change, it needs a transition, it needs to live and stop dragging its existence, and at this moment, in my opinion, only the Catholic Church is in a position to lead a dialogue and propose a transition.”

For this reason, Reyes concluded, “the people look to the bishops, and expect a clear position in favor of justice, freedom, in short, the Gospel.”

Reyes is one of the three Cuban priests who in recent weeks has been very critical of the social and political situation on the island. The first was Jorge Luis Pérez Soto, parish priest of San Francisco de Paula, in the municipality of Diez de Octubre, in Havana, who at the end of October said in a homily that “the Catholic cannot be apolitical, that is a lying word that only speaks of cowardice.”

“When a ruler is not willing to resign, is not willing to get out of the way for the common good, for the good of his people, for the good of his society, that Caesar is a tyrant,” Pérez said at a Sunday mass.

A few days later, Father Laureano Hernández Sasso lamented the deafness of the Cuban leaders. “Why do we have to beg? Why does President Miguel Díaz-Canel talk and talk and never say anything? Or do we have to tell our president that we cannot continue like this?” the priest wrote in his Facebook account.

In the past, several statements signed by the Cuban bishops have raised hives in the ruling party. One of the best known was the pastoral letter “El amor todo lo espera” (Love waits for all), signed by the Cuban Conference of Catholic Bishops in September 1993, during one of the hardest years of the economic crisis after the fall of the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe.

“The fight for justice is not a fight against which one can remain neutral, because this would be tantamount to putting oneself in favor of injustice,” the bishops said in that letter that was directly criticized by official spokesmen, including the journalist Lázaro Barrero, who called it a “telenovela title.”

Two decades later, the bishops published another pastoral letter entitled “La esperanza no defrauda” (Hope does not disappoint), which was read in all the churches of the country and which made a profound assessment of the Cuba of that time: “A new generation of Cubans, born in recent decades, has its own interpretation of our reality, with its own aspirations and interests, different from those of their predecessors. This generation lives with the firm desire that not only the present is better than the past, but that the future is better than the present,” they wrote.

The various declarations of priests inside and outside the Island are taking place a few days before the biannual celebration of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba. Many parishioners and members of the Church hope that a pronouncement on the acute crisis the country is experiencing will emerge from this meeting.

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However, a doctor and a nurse, who offered their testimony to 14ymedio on condition of anonymity, insist that the cause is negligence. “The corresponding tests were not being carried out on the patients who appeared with respiratory problems, and instead they were being treated as if it were asthma, allergies or bronchitis,” details the doctor.

“For years we have had a bus that transfers patients who must undergo hemodialysis,” adds the nurse. “As the transportation issue has become more complicated with the pandemic, other patients are also collected, including asthmatics and people who need routine treatments.”

“The problem was that in the same bus, patients who needed dialysis coincided for several days with others who obviously had Covid-19,” said the nurse. “The result is that at one point we had more than half of the patients in the nephrology ward also infected with the coronavirus.”

“When we found out, these nephrological patients had already spent time with their families, entered other areas of the hospital and had direct contact with doctors and nurses who had no protection,” she denounces. “A disaster and irresponsibility.”

Within the official data, in fact, it can be observed that several of Ciego de Ávila’s critically ill or seriously ill patients also suffer from kidney failure. This is the case for an 82-year-old citizen of the capital municipality, as well as another age 66 with kidney failure, a third age 65 with hydronephrosis, and a fourth age 68 with chronic kidney disease.

The province fell back to phase 1 on September 9, when it registered a total of 17 local contagion events. At that time, Miguel Díaz-Canel again blamed the outbreak on the “indiscipline” of the citizens.

Meanwhile, the keys, a popular tourist destination in the same province, are preparing to receive another flight from Canada, and the ruling party insists that “rigorous epidemiological control measures” are being carried out in Jardines del Rey to protect tourists and employees.

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.