Solos

She gets up every day at five in the morning, grabs her backpack and goes out to fight the different types of transport that can take her to her work place: the city of Caimito. Because there are only four doctors she has duty every two days—unpaid—and then returns to her house because the family medical practice they assigned her to has no door.

Even though they aren’t included among her patients, she takes care of the inhabitants of the Llega y Pon* shanty town in the neighborhood. In this area the work is more difficult, no one is registered and so they don’t exist: the children don’t have milk, the old people don’t have a special diet, electric light is a golden dream and hygiene is a bad word. She has tried to take action but always runs up against the wall of the bureaucracy: they have to go back to their place of origin, even the newborns, which in this case means the place of origin of the mother.

It’s one of the saddest stories I’ve heard, always when people talk to me of birth and primary care the dark shanty towns come into my head. Growing up surrounded by the major cities and seeming to be, for the government, unavoidable. Speaking on the subject a doctor friend told me that ten children without milk were not a flag to call into question the Cuban health services. But to me, neither a doctor nor a politician, I wonder how can a State that declares itself Socialist allow itself the luxury that children like that exist?

*Llega y Pon: Illegal settlements of people.