We Have Tough Months Ahead Here in Cuba

By Aurelio Pedroso (Progreso Semanal)

HAVANA TIMES – A doctor friend, and epidemiology specialist, wrote to me clearly, after a brilliant exercise of analysis/synthesis: that we must look after ourselves a lot because we’ll have “tough months” ahead of us.

Within these few words, and the saying that a smart person only needs a few words, we have a panorama that we will have to invest new energy into. It must come out of the little left to continue fighting because everybody knows that we have lost a lot of our physical and spiritual energy in this prolonged 16-month marathon race.

We’ll have to add other local factors that go hand-in-hand with SARS-CoV-2 to the noun and adjective used by this expert who is familiar with the ups and downs of the pandemic today and in the future.

These include diet and taking care of our health with medicines that aren’t always available in drugstores. Just two so as not to make the rosary of everyday economic and social problems too long.

You don’t need to have the virtues of a 5* analyst to understand that the government’s number 1 priority right now is to calm this virus down, reach manageable levels of control thanks to mass vaccination and to relaunch what was originally said when all of this bad news began: we have to learn to live with the disease.

My friend’s words should be followed up with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) warning of how the virus is a lot more intense and lethal in the second wave.

A litmus test that was never experienced or known in Cuba, that doesn’t allow for human mistakes or any other kind of mistake for that matter. That’s if we want to survive and then develop this country, for better or worse, so we can live to see another day.

Read more from Aurelio Pedroso here.