CubaNet reports that a school in Santiago de Cuba has been quarantined after several teachers and students were hospitalized with symptoms of the sometimes-deadly disease. Read more here.
Meanwhile, there’s grumbling in Canada that tourists aren’t being warned of the potential danger from disease-carrying mosquitos — and, presumably, the Cuban health care system.
Of course, judging by the numbers of Canadians who vacation in Cuba, they also aren’t being told the island is ruled by a tyrant and his sorry band of thugs.
Or they just don’t care.
Dengue is carried by the same vector as yellow fever. It was eradicated in Cuba more than 100 years ago thanks to one of humanity’s greatest benefactors, Dr. Carlos J. Finlay. During the Republican Era there was not a single case in Cuba. It returned with Castro’s Revolution and has never departed again although all that it would take to extinguish it would be the most elementary sanitation measures. Long before Castro’s botched operation there was overwhelming proof in the recurring dengue epidemics of Cuba’s failed public health system. When Cuba is at last free, it will be found that tens of thousands of Cubans have died from tropical diseases that were conquered long before 1959. These, too, are Castro’s victims.