Small fire in a room at the Maternal Hospital in Santiago de Cuba

Around 6 in the morning this Saturday, a small fire broke out in one of the rooms of the "Mariana Grajales" Maternal Hospital, formerly the Clínica de los Ángeles, in Santiago de Cuba.

According to a report fromCubanet, the fire would have originated from the short circuit of a television. The incident took place in the H-I room, on the third floor, where at the time of the incident there were almost twenty recently given birth women with their babies.

Among the women who were there was Zenaida Ramos Santana,the wife of political prisoner Ovidio Martín, coordinator of UNPACU, who called members of that organization by phone to report what was happening.

The testimony of the aforementioned media assures that, as explained by a witness, stretchers or wheelchairs were not used to transport the newly delivered mothers and their children to a safe place because there were none.

Firefighters arrived 40 minutes later, when the fire had been put out with fire extinguishers by hospital staff.

The director of the hospital told the women that the cause had been an overload in the electrical cables, due to the greater use of electricity at that time.

The general coordinator of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (Unpacu), José Daniel Ferrer - who is in prison - denounced at the end of September the terrible conditions in which he finds that maternity hospital.

"The pregnant women in the "Mariana Grajales" maternity hospital, former Los Angeles Clinic, are desperate. Energy crisis, lack of water, dirty bathrooms, poor nutrition, mistreatment. Impudence of tyranny," Ferrer wrote on Twitter.