Last week, a video of a Cuban man’s final moments went viral on X. The man, whom many guessed to be in thirties, was skin and bones and wearing a medical mask, and he’d told those nearby that he felt unwell before sitting down on a bench outside on a public sidewalk.
While he was sitting there, he simply slumped over and died. According to witnesses, his corpse remained there for many long hours under the Havana sun. Some tried to close his eyes, providing a little dignity. Others asked for a sheet to cover him. On one version of the video, you can hear someone say, “He died there sitting… he died of hunger, from the virus and the diseases.” (Warning: You may find the video below disturbing.)
Last I checked, no one knows what his cause of death was, but you probably just guess from any of the number of issues currently plaguing the country and get lucky. Cuba is currently a perfect storm for a random death.
Malnutrition. Hunger from food shortages. Many only eat by digging through the trash of others. Poverty, inflation, and repression are at their worst levels in decades, and people are stressed. An estimated 89% of them live in extreme poverty. The country that once had a stellar medical system is now filled with overwhelmed hospitals, medical supply shortages, and dilapidated facilities, while the regime exports its medical providers to other countries under its slave-like forced labor program. Garbage remains piled in the streets for weeks and months at a time, creating sanitation hazards, and blackouts are now the norm, not the exception, sometimes lasting most of the day, even in Havana. Many lack clean water.
As if that wasn’t enough, disease is running rampant. That’s why the man was wearing a mask. What the regime — or much of the media — won’t tell you is that Cuba is currently facing at least three simultaneous epidemics right now — dengue, chikungunya, and oropouche — and while it’s impossible to access real numbers, a third or more of the entire island’s population has gotten sick.
Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne illness that can cause muscle and joint pain, rash, headache, vomiting, swollen glands, and, in severe cases, blood vessel damage that leads to shock, internal bleeding, and organ failure. Severe cases are typically fatal. Chikungunya is also virus spread through mosquito bites. The symptoms are similar to dengue, and while it’s rarely fatal, it can cause debilitating pain that lasts for a few days up to a few months. Oropouche is typically spread through midges, though mosquitos can spread it too, and it causes fever, severe headache, chills, muscle aches, and joint pain that lasts for up to a week.
Cases of all three diseases have popped up all year and worsened in July, but they surged in September. By October, they reached “combined epidemiological crisis” levels. Flooding from Hurricane Melissa combined with the poor sanitation conditions in the country contributed to the surge. There’s not enough fuel to run the mosquito fumigation trucks. Infrastructure is in such bad shape that leaking pipes lead to stagnant water that allow for increased mosquito breeding, and there is a lack of available screens for windows and doors, but the increasing number of blackouts make it difficult to keep them closed.
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