- It helps cure diabetes, rehabilitates heart attack patients and increases libido, believers say
- There are 16 centers on the island and Díaz-Canel wants to “massify” their therapeutic use
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, August 13, 2024 — The line starts at seven in the morning, next to the Presbyterian temple on Reforma Street, between Santa Ana and Santa Felicia. The habaneros who get up early, however, do not come looking for the Lord – nor for the saints of both streets – but for the water that is dispensed in the church. More than blessed, it is “ozonized and purified,” and healing faculties that border on the miraculous are attributed to it.
Mercedes is one of the believers in the “properties” of ozone. “It’s good for everything, from parasites to bone problems,” she says, quoting her family doctor. For years, Mercedes has become – in her own words – an “ozone container.” She gets up early to go to the temple and guarantee “a few liters.” She drinks the water religiously and is unconditional about ozone therapy, which is available in almost any province of the Island.
“Ozone cures me of everything,” she says with fervor, like someone who invokes a healer or San Rafael, whom she does not deny either. For her, from the very Creole spell – a prayer to San Luis Beltrán for protection against the evil eye – to taping a ribbon around her waist to cure indigestion, “everything is natural medicine,” she explains, before finding her place in the line on Reforma Street.
The morning shadow of the temple does not calm the spirits. A line is a line, and when Mercedes asks* who is last in line there is already an argument in full swing. An old man, who is carrying his wheelbarrow with several gallons, shouts and waves his arms to scare away a line-breaker : “I was there before you and so was he,” he exclaims, pointing to a fellow waiter. “There are some shameless people,” he grumbles, when the intruder is already far away.
Mercedes is used to this kind of scene. In a precarious environment like Cuba’s, with almost no medicines available, the ozone water is gold. A glance at the line is enough to see the profile of most of the believers: elderly, sick, people in pain from various ailments, poor people.
Genaro, a colleague of Mercedes in the line, tells us about everything that ozone relieves: “back pain, blood pressure and circulatory problems, diabetes, asthma, and it also works on hernias.” The 67-year-old man, who goes to church armed with several so-called cucumbers – one and a half liter bottles – and a gallon, considers himself a “historical figure” when it comes to “Presbyterian water.”
For twelve or thirteen years, since the time he estimates that the service at the temple began, Genaro has been coming to get water. The fact that it is cleaner there and without strange particles, in a country where the water supply leaves much to be desired, is “medicinal” for him and his family.
The project of the Presbyterians – one of the Christian Churches that are on good terms with the Government, which lets it do this in exchange for its loyalty to the official Council of Churches – started thanks to American missionaries. The help “of the Americans” continues: they are the ones who, every year, come to repair and maintain the filters.
“The Americans built a cistern because there was a lot of demand,” Genaro explains. “They come every so often and look it over.”
None of the believers in line – neither Genaro or Mercedes – knows very well how the filtration and ozonization system works. The “apparatus,” as they call it, is safe inside the church facilities. No one is allowed to go in to see the equipment or loiter in the area where they keep it.
When there are too many people in line – the process gets slow sometimes, says Mercedes – they allow a group to fill their bottles from a faucet inside the church, but under strict surveillance. “It’s just that the residence is there, and they recently stole some sheets from the pastor,” Genaro confesses.
Usually, two people at a time approach the two plastic faucets that dispense the liquid, with all the calm in the world. The scene is repeated in many Cuban municipalities, where churches offer this service to help alleviate the hydrological debacle, one of many on the Island.
Taking three or four liters is free, although the Presbyterians now place a collection box next to the church, “to contribute a little.” There is a line until 11 in the morning, and then the “believers” return from three to four-thirty during the week and until six on Sundays.
“At the beginning of the project, people from the polyclinic came,” says Genaro. “They ruled that the water was perfect for consumption.” The old man alludes to the Ministry of Public Health as a global authority on ozone therapy issues, one of the alternative treatments that the Government has “expanded” the most – the term comes from the State newspaper Granma – throughout the globe.
Mercedes, for example, was referred to the Diez de Octubre hospital for a cycle of therapies. “First, a specialist, whether rheumatologist, ophthalmologist, etc., has to prescribe ozone therapy after an interview. You can’t have thyroid problems. Then they determine the frequency and method: there is rectal and paravertebral, that is, injections on both sides of the vertebrae,” the woman explains.
The doses increase. The initial is four weeks, every other day. Antioxidants must be removed during treatment. Suspend or eat less guava, tea, coffee, chocolate and fish. Your libido increases,” she explains mischievously, “your immune system improves, you eliminate parasites. You can immediately notice the improvement, although there are countries that do not accept it and say that it’s useless,” she says, before finishing with a fact: “Ozone is a very old project of the Revolution, and that’s why I have given it to myself all my life.”
Mercedes is not wrong. Not a month passes before the official press publishes one or two articles on the “results and horizons” of ozone therapy in Cuba, a treatment more than discussed by specialists around the world.
At the end of last year, Miguel Díaz-Canel himself was informed about the “positive impact” of the treatment. Its therapeutic use must be “mainstreamed,” the president then decreed, guaranteeing that its results “are proven.”
However, ozone therapy falls under the jurisdiction of the department of Natural and Traditional Medicine of the ministry, whose director – in that same meeting – had little to contribute, except for commonplaces and the fact that it is considered “preventive medicine” on the Island. There are 16 ozone therapy centers in the country, and a diploma is offered to study its effects.
The benefits that Cuban Public Health officially attributes to ozone are much more than Mercedes or Genaro imagine. Díaz-Canel was convinced that, with the treatment, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and diabetes can be faced; it rehabilitates those who have had aneurysms – no matter if it is heart or brain – and its rectal application “accelerated” the recovery of coronavirus patients in 2020. “We were very advanced,” the specialists congratulated themselves in front of Díaz-Canel.
The truth is that there is no scientific evidence that ozone – either in the “holy water,” by anal route or injected into the spine – has the high healing qualities attributed to it by the Public Health of the Island. Like the venom of blue scorpion, on which a dangerous pseudotherapeutic industry has been built, ozone therapy is one of the standards of regime medicine.
“Ozone therapy is not approved either by the European Medicines Agency or by the US Food and Drug Administration
“Ozone therapy is not approved by either the European Medicines Agency (EMA) or the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA),” Dr. Jerónimo Fernández Torrente, coordinator of the Observatory Against Pseudosciences of the Collegiate Medical Organization of Spain, clarified in 2018. “There is no credible scientific evidence that endorses the use of ozone as a type of medical therapy, much less for serious diseases such as cancer. In fact, medical reports and articles have been published on deaths of patients with this method.”
It is a “tremendous deception that we should denounce,” the doctor then said. “At the end of the day, ozone is a toxic gas; it is not harmless.”
These warnings do not discourage Genaro or Mercedes, who will return tomorrow to line up for the “holy water” of the Presbyterians. They follow the principle of Cuban domestic medicine to the letter: “What does not kill, fattens,” and – with their overflowing buckets and their immovable opinions – they continue to venerate San Ozono.
*Translator’s note: When Cubans join a line they ask “who’s last” and then, after the next person comes and they are now that person’s ’last’, they are free to wander around and can rejoin the line in ’their place’ at any time.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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