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How is it possible that the Cuban regime now speaks of a “percentage” of patients with chikungunya aftereffects, when just a month ago its own portal from the Presidency of Cuba reported that, only in Matanzas, 5,000 people had been treated and 60% of them needed rehabilitation?
The contrast between both official reports not only reveals a lack of coherence but also a deliberate strategy of opacity that the government uses to mask its failure in controlling the epidemic.
On December 24, in a meeting of experts led by the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel, the mathematician Raúl Guinovart stated that the predictive models "forecasted complete control of the epidemic by the beginning of the year."
The Deputy Minister of Health, Carilda Peña García, reinforced the message with supposedly encouraging figures: a 25% reduction in fever syndromes and the country's entry into an "epidemiological channel of success."
However, the same report included—almost hidden at the end—a paragraph that contradicted that optimism: “In Matanzas, for example, more than 5,000 patients have been treated, and nearly 60% have required some form of rehabilitation service.”
That figure, which amounts to about 3,000 patients with chronic sequelae in just one province, was enough to challenge the triumphalist narrative of "total control."
The magnitude of the damage was already evident at that time. If there were thousands affected with lasting repercussions in just one area, the national extent of the problem must have been much greater.
A month later, on January 19, at another meeting of experts also led by Díaz-Canel, the Presidency completely omitted Guinovart's predictions and the topic of mathematical models.
Instead, the meeting focused on presenting the "encouraging results" of the drug Jusvinza, an experimental repurposed medication for treating post-viral inflammation.
It was there that the rheumatologist Miguel Hernán Estévez del Toro spoke of a “percentage” of patients who will develop chronic inflammatory arthropathy.
The vague and imprecise expression replaced the concrete figures from the previous month.
From numbers to silence
Official communication thus shifted from numbers to empty rhetoric.
What in December were thousands of cases needing rehabilitation turned in January into an abstract estimate that is impossible to verify. Neither MINSAP nor the portal of the Presidency provided any explanation regarding this loss of information.
No epidemiological updates were published, nor was the failure to meet Guinovart's predictions, which spoke of a control "at the beginning of the year," assessed.
This narrative mutation is not a mistake: it is a communication strategy of the regime. The government alternates between technical triumphalism and informational ambiguity to maintain the illusion of control without acknowledging its ineffectiveness.
When the figures are favorable, they are showcased as national successes; when they become problematic, they become diluted in phrases like “a percentage” or “national result.”
The silence surrounding the mathematical models and the disappearance of data from Matanzas confirm that the regime has known since December that it was facing a wave of chronic cases.
However, he chose to conceal the magnitude of the problem and replace the health debate with a propaganda message surrounding Jusvinza, presented as a symbol of "scientific resilience."
Health propaganda instead of transparency
The change in tone between the two meetings not only reveals a contradiction but also exposes the systematic manipulation of the public health discourse in Cuba.
The regime does not seek to inform or be accountable, but rather to control the narrative and protect the image of the ruler. The result is a communication that strays from scientific truth and leaves the population in uncertainty.
Of the 3,000 patients with documented sequelae in Matanzas, the country has moved to a “percentage” that no one dares to specify.
A transformation that does not respond to science, but rather to the political calculations of a regime that turns every epidemic into propaganda and every piece of data into a state secret.
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