The camera of my cell phone is not high-end, nor does it have the megapixels required to discover the beauty of his elusive eyes.
The balcony railings barely offer me bits of his little body. He observes with curiosity this stranger who, with the consent of his father, takes a photo of him.
I, below, more than two meters away, ask him how he feels. He nods his head and after staring at me, he escaped into his house.
I can’t get to him and he won’t know that by checking him alive and well, my happiness has become as big as the world’s ball.
Meeting Luisney, Jaruco’s first pediatric patient, infected with the SARS-CoV 2 virus, was a very intimate desire since his case was imprinted on the documents and minds of the epidemiologists, doctors, nurses and technicians of the locality, from Mayabeque and from Cuba.
This six-year-old boy lives in the community of Bainoa, a territory that burns in the middle of winter, because the coronavirus spreads, making more than a dozen people sick, and among them, two other children.
The nurse in his medical office, who knows him and watches over his health since before his birth, Sorangel Pérez González, says that Luisney is already cured, while putting away my concern about the child’s thinness: “he’s like that, tiny”, she reassures me.
“He has not had a fever or is weak, but he is still under surveillance”, expresses this woman with a hopeful smile that illuminates the cosmonaut suit, which allows her to be protected and take care of her loved ones.
Dr. Adriana Gloria Liranza, dressed in the same way, puts accents on all the words of her colleague and refers to Luisney with the same affection as a close aunt.
His father was the first to contract the disease and that is how he and his mother were infected, but they are all at home, safe and with many eyes and arms watching over them, for their well-being, I confirm this with joy, too with pride.
When the danger of the coronavirus recedes, Luisney will once again run around the red earth of his town, return to school, finish learning the alphabet and, perhaps, write the story of a little sun that lit up the night of the pandemic.
We will all know that it is his own story, that of a child who was saved by Cuban science and medicine.
