My friend Julio exasperates many times before the impotence of not fulfilling his task completely. On those occasions he may feel as painful as when he lose someone close, familiar. In his work there is no room for mistakes and much less for laments; although in many of those moments there is no other solution but to embrace pain and farewells. Dr. Julio is the deputy director of the Pediatric Hospital of Matanzas.
In Matanzas, on a few occasions, the heroic task of saving lives is held back by an insurmountable obstacle for our specialists: the blockade.
And I know that in our polyclinics and hospitals, much to our regret, there are still manifestations that undermine the good name of Cuban public health and that can be rooted out by the administrations and medical teams in those places, cleanliness and order, among others that lacerate the people.
However, it is a humiliating and undeniable reality that, despite the efforts of our best specialists, a Cuban dies because he does not have a dose of Temozolamide, one of the drugs in the chemotherapeutic treatment; or that one of the children of my friend Julio perishes because in Matanzas there was not at the time a mass spectrometer, high-tech equipment that allows diagnosing and early detection of metabolic diseases or inborn errors of metabolism. It hurts a lot.
This is the case with Etecsa and the quality and price of telecommunications services that we must support in order to start conversations with family members or send a simple SMS to a friend. The free internet access test of the last weekend is still fresh, which not only prevented many from accessing the network of networks, but updating their nauta email or calling and sending messages. Here too the impact of the blockade is strongly felt.
In the last report of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on this hostile policy of the United States against our Island, it is reported that this company suffered losses of more than 60 million dollars in the last year, and the contracting of roaming services was significantly affected, in addition, we are unable to access high-performance brands and equipment that are leaders in the info communications market and prevent access from Cuba to some of the most important content on the Internet and information download services.
In Varadero, the effects of the commercial siege are also suffered, and this is also one of the sectors most affected by this policy. From January to early March, the arrival of American tourists decreased by 43% and more than 240 tourist group reservations for Cuba were canceled.
The internal blockade, the bad work and the lack of initiative have damaged us a lot, also in these decades of special period, however, the other one, which the Yankees apply to us, is there, remains like a Damocles sword and limits us, beyond our mistakes.
According to the Minrex report, between April 2017 and March of this year, the application of the blockade has caused losses of more than 4 321 million dollars.
This monster, an anachronistic inheritance of the Cold War, is today the most unjust, severe and prolonged system of unilateral sanctions that has been applied against any country and it becomes a huge challenge for our country to fulfill the Millennium Development Goals. That's why, despite impotence, my friend Julio never stops. The life of one of his children cannot depend on the hatred and unreason of the Americans.
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