The dictatorship of Fidel and Raul Castro in Cuba has never been shy about tooting its own horns when announcing the mythical and nonexistent advances of the Revolution. However, it is deathly silent when it comes to reality on the island.

Via the Miami Herald:

Cuba stays silent about deadly cholera outbreak

It’s the disease that the government doesn’t acknowledge, because it might deter tourists from coming to the island.

 

A worker fumigates during a campaign against dengue fever in Havana, Cuba, Wednesday, July 27, 2011.
Javier Galeano / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cuban dissident Walter Clavel says that when he took his 2-year-old son to a hospital Wednesday with a case of diarrhea, the boy was tested for a sometimes fatal disease that the government is stubbornly refusing to acknowledge — cholera.

Nurses told him the test was negative, and the boy was not quarantined in the three wards reserved for cholera patients at the North Pediatric Hospital in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, Clavel said.

Cuba, especially the eastern third of the island, is suffering through an alarming outbreak of cholera — as well as the mosquito-borne dengue fever — brewed in its decrepit water and sewer systems and fueled by Hurricane Sandy’s floods, according to residents.

More than a dozen deaths have been reliably reported. Hospitals and prisons have been quarantined at times. Schools have been shut down, and so have restaurants and street kiosks selling juices and other products made with water.

Government buildings have established hand and shoe disinfection stands at their entrances. Some public health officials have gone door to door asking if anyone is suffering from diarrhea, vomiting or fevers, and others distributed water purification tablets.

Cuba’s government has said nothing publicly about cholera since Aug. 28, when it announced that an outbreak in the eastern city of Manzanillo — the first in a century — had ended after three deaths and 417 confirmed cases.

Spread by bacteria that cause severe diarrhea and vomiting, the disease killed millions in the Middle Ages.

Police in uniform and plainclothes stationed at hospitals are telling visitors to keep quiet about cholera and other diseases, Clavel told El Nuevo Herald — apparently to avoid upsetting the Caribbean island’s $2.5 billion-a-year tourism industry.

“We have to question whether the Cuban government today prioritizes their need for tourism … more than local public health demands,” wrote Sherri Porcelain, a public health expert at the University of Miami and researcher at its Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies.

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