Cuba: The dengue problem · Global Voices
Georgia Popplewell

The video above appeared on YouTube on September 29, 2006, with no accompanying information but the tags “cuba” and “dengue“. Linked earlier this week by The Real Cuba, it appears to support what blogger Marc Masferrer wrote last Friday:
Everyone in Havana and other cities has seen the clouds of insecticides used to attack the disease-carrying mosquitos that spread dengue, and heard exhortations from temporary dictator Raúl Castro and other government officials about the importance of stamping out the epidemic.
“But,” Masferrer continued, “there has been no information released by the government detailing how widespread the epidemic really is.” The international and independent Cuban press, he wrote, have reported “anywhere from 4,000 to 35,000 people infected, and anywhere from 40 to 700 dead,” and two Cuban independent journalists reporting on the epidemic were detained and threatened by the police. Masferrer also reproduced a CubaNet article stating that health workers had been warned not to release information about the dengue epidemic. The Medicina Cubana blog reported even earlier last week that the director of a Cuban hospital may have succumbed to the disease.
This Monday, however, Orlando, a Cuban based in California, links to a short entry in the Spanish-language blog Estancia Cubana reporting that the Cuban government has finally admitted that they may have a dengue fever problem on their hands. In the same post, Orlando reproduces a Latin American Times article written in 2002 — “the last time that Cuba entered into the battle of the vectors” — and asks: “Has anything changed? With the exception of a couple of names this story could have been written today.”
The video below, posted on YouTube on October 1, 2006 and entitled “Fumigacion en Cienfuegos”, claims (ES) to have been taken en route to the city of Trinidad and to show “the fumigation of cars against the dengue mosquito [Aedes aegypti]. We had to leave the car shut for five minutes. . . . They stopped us once more after this to fumigate again.”