Perhaps you who’s reading this would feel the same way if your entire family—I repeat, your entire family—had recently been infected with a “virus” or is currently infected, and you don’t even know what it is, how to treat it, or who to turn to. You also know that the country’s healthcare system is in chaos.

I’m talking about Cuba.

My 84-year-old grandmother began with a high fever that lasted several days. She couldn’t feel her legs. I’m far away from her, closer to the Pacific than the Caribbean, but I’m told she could barely get out of bed. Grandma “Cuquita” recovered little by little and is now eating well, but the pain in her legs continues.

My aunt, young and strong, who lives in another neighborhood in Cienfuegos, had gotten the same disease earlier.

“I couldn’t open water bottles, because taking off the caps hurt so much. My legs gave out. All my joints hurt. My fever reached 40 C (104 F) They told me not to take Ibuprofen, only Duralgina. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find any. I got some Paracetamol, and a nurse friend told me to take two at a time. The fever went down a little, but in less than four hours it went back up. I was really scared – I had never felt like that before. That was 15 days ago, and I’m still weak,” she told me in a WhatsApp audio message.

“Who told you not to take Ibuprofen? Did you go to the doctor?” I asked her.

“Girrrrrl… Are you crazy? Why would I go to the doctor? To end up worse! They don’t have anything. They don’t do tests because there are no reagents. They send you to buy medicine outside, and you have to wait hours and hours to be seen. Here in the neighborhood, everyone has been through this. Going to the hospital is pointless. I think I had chikungunya, but it could be anything. If you ask me, there’s something very serious going around that they don’t even know about,” she replied, between laughter and resignation.

My 22-year-old sister was worse off. She fainted, had a very high fever that wouldn’t go down, developed swollen lymph nodes behind her ears, and got a rash all over her body.

The worst part was worrying that my little niece and nephew could get infected. Until it happened.

First the little one, aged 5, spiked a fever of 40 degrees. She had no appetite, and was covered in hives that itched. Then her brother, aged 11, got sick with a fever, pain in his hands and feet, and the same lack of appetite. Their parents took them to the pediatric hospital in Cienfuegos. Was that of any help?

When a child gets sick, you expect a specialist to examine them, to run tests, to give guidance, to help… but that wasn’t the case.

“There was only one thermometer for almost 30 children in the urgent care clinic. We waited five hours for them to be seen. All that time they had high fevers and the shakes. There was nowhere to sit. I ran out of water and went to buy some inside the hospital, but they didn’t have any either. A total disaster. In the end, the doctor saw them for three minutes. He said to give them paracetamol and rest. At that point, they hadn’t developed a rash yet. Apparently, it was dengue, but no one bothered to distinguish whether it was that or Oropouche fever or something else. I don’t know the differences, and no one explained them to me. We got through it because God is great,” the children’s mother told me.

She, too, had gone through the “virus.” She had conjunctivitis, couldn’t lift her arms, her feet were swollen, and nothing brought her fever down. She was just recovering when the children got sick.

“There came a point when I only had enough paracetamol for them. I took cold baths to bring my fever down,” she wrote to me. Family, neighbors, friends… everyone has their own story of getting through the “virus.”

These testimonies are from Cienfuegos, my hometown, but in Havana and Caibarién on the coast, the stories repeat themselves.

A martial arts master knocked to the mat

In Central Havana, a young student I’ll call “E” has had to take care of his father. The 62-year-old man had been a martial artist all his life, but now the arboviruses circulating in the country have knocked him down more easily than his toughest former opponents.

“He’s been lying on the sofa for days, with a fever ranging from 102 – 104º. At moments, he shivers and seems delirious. He hardly eats anything. Sometimes he gets up and tries to walk, but I have to hold him up because he collapses,” the young man told ElToque.

In his whole life, he’s rarely seen his father this sick. He explains that his father has diarrhea, severe pain in his joints and limbs, and swollen hands, In addition, during these days of fighting off “the viruses,” his father’s old injuries from combat and sports training have reappeared, as if they had been sustained yesterday.

Amidst the shortage of medicine and food, the “treatment” he has been following is to drink a tea made from a plant popularly known as ‘meprobamate’ [an anxiety drug] because, as E assures me, “it calms muscle aches and relaxes the body.”

When I ask E if he has taken his father to see a doctor, his answer reflects an opinion that is common sense for many Cubans: “No, because the attention you get there is shit.”

What my family is going through is no exception. It is a portrait of a sick country.

Public Health department offers only slogans

From Pinar del Río to Guantanamo, thousands of families are experiencing the same symptoms, the same feverish nights without medicine, the same futile visits to overwhelmed hospitals. But the government remains silent. There are no verified figures on infections, let alone deaths from causes associated with arboviruses. The authorities speak of “nonspecific feverish symptoms” or “controlled outbreaks,” while in practice, people are fighting a battle for survival on their own.

The Ministry of Public Health has still not acknowledged the magnitude of this outbreak of dengue, chikungunya, and oropouche fever. The epidemiological reports are nothing but slogans, and the official media barely cover the extent of what is happening. Doctors—exhausted, underpaid, and without supplies—do what they can in hospitals that lack everything from syringes to basic reagents for testing.

There are also no clear statements from the international organizations operating on the island. Meanwhile, citizen reports, WhatsApp audio messages, and social media posts have become the only real source for understanding the scale of the health disaster Cuba is experiencing.

All this plays out amid power outages lasting more than ten hours a day, shortages of water, food, and medicine, in a country still reeling from Hurricane Melissa, which devastated eastern Cuba in late October. Entire communities were left isolated, without electricity or shelter, and with diseases multiplying amid the mud and debris.

In the neighborhoods, the only real help comes from outside: remittances, packages, and medicines sent by relatives from the United States or Europe. But even that is not enough.

Public health—one of the pillars of official discourse—is crumbling amid a lack of resources, misinformation, and institutional neglect. In the state media, the narrative remains the same: “resistance,” “solidarity,” “blockade.” But in homes, on the streets, in hospitals, the reality is different: fever, pain, fear, and silence.

The question remains, more urgent than ever: what is the government doing?

This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.