The municipality of Unión de Reyes, in the province of Matanzas, reported 154 patients with unspecified febrile syndromes in recent days, warned Dr. Raidel Sotes Carrera, the general director of health for the area, in a report published this Friday by the newspaper Girón.
Local health authorities are intensifying active epidemiological surveillance through IGM testing to determine if the dengue virus is circulating in the municipality, with particular attention to the municipal seat and the town of San Antonio de Cabezas, identified as areas of greater complexity.
One of the most serious obstacles facing the health response is the inability to carry out fumigation as frequently as necessary. Sotes Carrera himself acknowledged this bluntly: "The adulticidal treatment, commonly known as fogging, has not been able to be performed with the required regularity due to the complex energy situation the country is experiencing."
Given this limitation, the brigades of the Department of Vectors and Antivectorial Surveillance, which also operate with a shortage of personnel, focus their efforts on targeted control, larviciding in high-risk areas, and the immediate blockage of fever cases through peripheral treatments.
The health authorities of Unión de Reyes urged the population to immediately seek medical services if experiencing any feverish symptoms and to eliminate containers with stagnant water that could become breeding grounds for the transmitting mosquito Aedes aegypti.
The situation in Unión de Reyes is not an isolated case. Matanzas reported its first cases of dengue for the 2026 season in June, in the southern part of the province, and the crisis is spreading throughout the entire island.
In that same month, the Deputy Minister of Public Health, Carilda Peña, publicly warned about the risk of a new dengue epidemic due to the simultaneous circulation of all four serotypes of the virus in Cuba. "If we do not take a set of actions, we could face an epidemic," she warned.
Other provinces are experiencing similarly critical situations. Guantánamo remains under Epidemiological Alert exacerbated by the proliferation of dumps.
Likewise, Pinar del Río was facing three active outbreaks of hepatitis last week and a high infestation of Aedes aegypti. In that province, indoor fumigation is also subject to the availability of electricity.
The accumulation of uncollected garbage exacerbates the transmission cycle throughout the country. In Santa Clara, a dump in the middle of a residential neighborhood has gone over 100 days without attention, a situation that the residents themselves directly associate with the risk of dengue.
The national context is alarming: Cuba ended 2025 with over 81,900 cases of dengue and chikungunya and at least 65 deaths, according to data from the Pan American Health Organization.
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