Negotiating life?

Desperate to save her mother, a friend of mine paid 1,500 pesos for a blister pack (three pills) of Azithromycin. Two days ago, a colleague decried on Facebook the illegal sale of the same pills at a price of 4,000 pesos! As if their value in the black market was proportional to the worsening of the pandemic.

The illegal marketing of medicines has become rampant in Cuba, if discreetly during the last few years, but an unstable production, caused mainly by U.S. blockade-related limitations to purchase raw materials, has paved the way for the current state of affairs.

The health crisis generated by the pandemic and the intensification of the U.S. economic attacks on Cuba make it harder to meet the demand, so a number of unscrupulous individuals seize the opportunity to feather their nest at the expense of people’s hardships, regardless of the efforts made by law enforcement.

Logic indicates that most of the drugs on sale in public spaces such as social networks—mainly Revolico, turned into a hotbed of illegal transactions, crimes and even subversion against Cuba—are stolen from health care centers, since you will hardly find Azithromycin in any pharmacy, and Rocephin is only for intra-hospital use.

As the popular saying goes: “If it’s green and spiky, it’s soursop!” And by no means will drugs made in Cuba be mistaken for those imported by travelers, since their appearance is different.

It is true that people break the law in moments of despair, and those who buy medicines of dubious origin do not wonder whether they come from criminal acts such as not supplying them to patients for whom they were intended.

Although we may not be able to realize it, when the life of a loved one depends on these acts, the theft and sale of drugs become all the more questionable, and purchasing them makes you complicit with them.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez admitted that we have been passive in the face of these practices. “Since those in charge of preventing those acts—managers and workers of health care centers, law enforcement—failed to understand their responsibilities and to take heed of people’s demands, now it is a governmental decision based on a clear sentence: We will not be soft with the illegal sale of medicines".

The instructions about how to crack down on those bold enough to put a price on life, especially in times of pandemic, were clear: improve inventory control, reinforce security and protection, and impose harsh criminal and administrative penalties on those who steal and sell medicines.