Yélidis Remón Vega | internet@granma.cu
August 21, 2025
Raiza, a founding member of the Henry Reeve. It is Sunday at 11:39. A moment ago there was electricity, but now, it is gone. «If the electricity plant is not working, it is very dangerous». We get a sustained noise that wakes up babies in their mother’s tummies. Little by little, the noise unites to the echo of steps against green walls and to some painful moan, or to those «how are you feeling?», capable of finding answers in mute eyes.
Many times I listened to her asking the question, and not because much time has passed. Rayza has short nails, as if she eats them. But no. I do not know if she realizes that her left leg trembles while she reads me a clinic history. The same trembling that I noticed two times when we were speaking about death.
The unit of Intermedia Care of Hospital Salvador Allende knows nothing about largesse. So many of the material resources it demands are lacking that there are many empty spots. In the doctor's room, a water leak splits into a metallic bucket. Rayza tells me the stories of her mission in Venezuela; the children that carry her name after successful deliveries mainly «thanks to God and everything that exists».
She was there for almost six years, mostly in a place called San Rafael de Onoto, more than five hours from Caracas. When she arrived to the Center of Integral Diagnosis (Centro de Diagnóstico Integral) just graduated and with a diploma in intensive therapy that was obtained in two months of classes, she realized that she was the only therapist and she confronted her work the best she could, comings and goings to emergencies, carrying, at times, books that weighted more than 20 stethoscopes together.
With the money from the «frozen account» she bought her home in which she lives today with her children, husband and her 80 year old mother –retired nurse–, and her twin, who has «a slight mental delay and paranoid schizophrenia», turned into organic damage.
The vocation and the certificate of Medical Doctor that she cares for so much, because it was signed directly by Fidel, «in his own handwriting»– come from her days with her mother «mami», at the Calixto García, and also from thinking that her brother would need her even more with time.
«Who knows me knows what kind of doctor I am. I get along with the doctor, the professor, the scientist; but I get even better with the orderly, the one who sweeps our floors, the one who cleans…».
In our neighbourhood «everybody» visits her when she is sick and she lets go of anything to put herself «in action for the people». It does not matter much if she is cooking or baking the sweets she sells in a small stall she made in her home.
Now she brings a bulk of papers to cancel the contract she made with a mipyme, where she used to buy flour and sugar. All this because the prices go up with the dollar. Later she will go to the ONAT to see, even if she is not making any money does she have to pay taxes.
God will know what she thinks about on the road she takes by foot from her home to the hospital but always something moves her to walk the 2 to 3 kilometers. Once there, she tries to forget a little of her problems: that there may not be electricity or that the water may not come today -as it is not coming already for 3 days. And, even if only a few times she is successful, she knows that whatever happens, she cannot go down, because if she is afraid, if she breaks down, the people would do worse.
She says, «Cuban at the end, invents him/herself». Death does not seem to understand scarcity. A few minutes of her day she dedicates to writing the clinical stories of all that takes place with her patients. She fills out papers saying that one has these symptoms and should have received such medicine, but she had to use another one because the one needed was not available. And this makes her ask herself: «Who protects me from my own scarcities?».
In the meantime, when we can see her walk and retrace the hospital searching for a barter, o going to the other side of the center to consult with a man who is very sick, one feels a bit of relieve, continues to believe that there will always be people like her, people who continues «struggling with what we do not have and with the little we have».
Translation NSCUBA (Nova Scotia)
