Leticia PINEDA
France Media Agency
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Like 31,000 Cuban children attending specialized establishments, Jhoselyn saw his therapies interrupted when the center closed due to COVID-19. And the operations she was to undergo were postponed indefinitely.
Without forgetting the shortage of medicines and orthopedic equipment, while the embargo in force since 1962 has been accentuated in recent years by Washington, which denounces human rights violations and Havana’s support for the government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. .
The annual UN vote on the resolution condemning the embargo, usually supported by a large majority of countries, is scheduled for Wednesday.
Education for children with disabilities “has been one of the sectors most affected by the combination of the pandemic and the strengthening of the blockade policy against our country”, recently assured the press Beatriz Roque, director of this branch at the ministry. education.
Since her birth, Jhoselyn, a slender preteen with long dark hair, has had to go through hardships, such as the death of her mother when she was six and then a series of five operations to correct the deformities due to the cerebral palsy with which she was born. born.
“COVID-19 prevented the operation that should have followed,” worries his father Maykel Nobrega, a 39-year-old construction worker. The hospital that follows the young girl is entirely dedicated to coronavirus patients.
After the pandemic
Jhoselyn, who caught the virus in February, is not losing her smile. Arms in the air, she dances happily during a game of video games with her cousins.
“What would I like to do the most? She asks herself. “Start running with my cousin in the street, get on a bicycle!” ”
She should have already had surgery on her knees and feet. The specialists had scheduled these operations in 2020, to allow him to finally walk normally. They will have to wait after the pandemic.
And if the country has only 163,415 cases for 11.2 million inhabitants, Cuba does not seem to be out of the woods: Tuesday, a new record of daily cases (1,537) was crossed.
The prognosis for Jhoselyn “is very favorable, I think that if all goes well, she will be able to walk without any accessories, without crutches” after these operations, assures her physiotherapist Jamileth Quintero.
The difficulties are not new to her. “Once, he was prescribed a prosthesis to sleep but there was no plastic for that”, many materials could not reach the island because of the embargo, explains Maykel, the father. “We had to wait until they found some.”
Supply issues
Its specialized school, called Solidaridad con Panama and located near Havana, suffers from these supply problems, as do the 345 similar establishments on the island.
Braille reading machines cannot be repaired for lack of spare parts, there are not enough electric chairs, nor light equipment for orthotics, details Marlen Triana, director at the Ministry of Education.
Even hearing aid batteries are running low. Without them, “these prostheses cannot work”: “If the child cannot listen, how do we help him to move forward? She laments.
Roilan and Radmall Gonzalez, two brothers aged 13 and 14 with intellectual disabilities, are educated in the Sierra Maestra center in Havana. If they have made great progress with the help of teachers and therapists, they too face the difficulties of everyday life.
Roilan “needs a drug, carmabazepine, and sometimes we can’t find it”, forcing his mother to seek by all means this treatment which calms her anxiety, says Pilar Medina, director of the school. And, without him, “his socialization is more complicated”.
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