A group of relatives of those who diedCOVID-19 In the province of Holguín, some reacted with bewilderment and others with indignation to the mixing of the mortal remains of their loved ones, who at the time of the exhumation were not properly identified.
"Today in Holguín they took all the corpses out of the graves. Without a plate on the destroyed boxes and they are lying outside the graves. The relatives cannot identify them and are desperate. The poor deceased from the COVID period"Avana de la Torre wrote on Twitter.
The activist accompanied her text with a short video that showed the indignation of a woman who screamed for Comunales to assume responsibility for the disaster. "I'm going to call the Central Committee, Down with Canel, fuck!" the woman shouted in the midst of her desperation.
"This is how all the relatives are, everyone, here no one knows who is who", added another calmer woman, but equally disconcerted by the sad spectacle of broken boxes without proper identification.
The coronavirus pandemic confronted the Cuban government with the lack of spaces in cemeteries.
The increase in deaths from COVID-19 forced the expansion of cemeteries.
Construction brigades worked in provinces such as Holguín, Villa Clara, Ciego de Ávila, where vaults for burials associated with the pandemic were built at full speed, but there were no shortage of complaints throughout the country of burials in common graves,complaints that the government always denied.
"No one was prepared. It is very ungrateful that we have no place to put the Cubans who unfortunately die to attend to the cremations and transfers of 69 deceased daily," Ihosvany Fernández Fernández, provincial director of Guantánamo Community Services, admitted in 2021 in an interview for the local television.
The situation was no different in almost all the provinces of the country.
Two years later, in the middle of the exhumation process of the improvised burials of that time, the complaints are already beginning.
Cemeteries in Cuba: Not even the deceased rest in peace
In recent years, there have been many complaints on social networks or even articles in the official press about the deplorable state of cemeteries in Cuba.
In January of this year, a family that buried a loved one in the San Carlos Borromeo cemetery, in the city of Matanzas, reported having found in the family vaultseveral open coffins with bone remains missing.
According to previous complaints, in the cemetery ofCiego de Ávila rudimentary and unhygienic exhumations are carried out.
It has also been referred topoor condition of the Velasc cemeteryO, in the province of Holguín. In November of last year it was reportedabandonment of the Isle of Youth cemetery known as Columbia Cemetery or “American Cemetery.”
At the beginning of 2023, the complaints fell on thedramatic situation that the cemeteries of Sancti Spíritus are going through.
On the list of problems are the same ones that affect burial grounds in other provinces: theft of funeral objects, flowers, weeding of the areas, presence of remains of coffins, accumulation of garbage and shortage of cement to properly close the niches.
The situation is evident even in theColón Cemetery, in Havana, which presents a general deterioration and it does not escape robberies, looting and bad smells, according to relatives of the deceased and employees of the main necropolis of the island, declared a National Monument in 1987.
The Cuban government admitted in 2018 that the country's more than 800 cemeteries were collapsed.
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