From potatoes to deodorant, toilet paper and bottled beer, Cubans have come to accept continual shortages as an inevitable part of existence following more than half a century of communist rule.
Now a shrinking supply of condoms has upset residents of the Caribbean island nation and alarmed overall health officials who are concerned by the chance of an enhance in sexually transmitted illnesses and unwanted pregnancies.
Pharmacies in the central province of Villa Clara began operating out of condoms in the middle of final month, according to Cuban bloggers reporting on the crisis, with shortages spreading to other towns and villages, and suburbs of the capital Havana in recent weeks.
One of the worst impacted places, the observers say, is the city of Santa Clara, which presently has one of the highest costs of HIV infection on the island. They say that Cenesex, the state-run Cuban nationwide centre for intercourse schooling, which is headed by President Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela, has ordered the dwindling supplies to be allocated to regions of greatest require, like acknowledged carriers of HIV.
As a end result, standard citizens going to pharmacies in search of condoms are obtaining empty shelves, according to evidence collected by Havana blogger Polina Martínez Shvietsova, who carried out an ad-hoc survey.
She stated referred to as a amount of pharmacy owners in many locations, who all advised her: “We really don’t have any, and we really do not know when we’ll get some.”
Other analysts warned of the overall health risk. “The men and women in the street, [those] generating enjoy in homes of lease, godforsaken corridors, in parks, these are sources of possible chains of infection,” explained one particular anonymous man quoted by Cubanet, a Miami-based independent network of bloggers and dissidents.
So far there has been no official reaction from the Cuban government to the reviews. One particular regional official blamed troubles with supplies from China in an interview with the Villa Clara newspaper Vanguardia this month but supplied no answer about when the scenario would ease.
But Juan Carlos Gonzalez, director of the state-run wholesaler Ensume, which is responsible for obtaining and supplying most of the nation’s government-subsidised condoms, told the newspaper there were far more than a million condoms in the company’s warehouses and that the difficulty was the end result of his workers currently being unable to meet demand.
He explained Ensume had struggled to preserve up with a ruling by the state’s regulatory health care agency Cecmed two many years ago that the 2012 expiration date on hundreds of thousands of condoms imported from China was incorrect and that the packages had to be relabelled 2014.
Gonzalez said the employees could only repackage 1,440 strips of three condoms per day whilst the demand in Villa Clara province alone was five,000 day-to-day. Consequently, the cost of a single condom has risen from just pennies to about $ one.30, a day’s wages for a common Cuban worker.
Till now, condom supplies have not been a difficulty in Cuba, which has often had an aggressive sexual wellness programme and has been praised by the Planet Overall health Organization as having a single of the lowest costs of HIV/AIDS in the western hemisphere.
But the WHO did note in a 2005 report that HIV infections had been increasing since of an boost in prostitution and intercourse tourism on the island.
The condom shortage, meanwhile, has also impacted people who use the prophylactics for non-sexual purposes. Anglers use them to give floats a glossy sheen eye-catching to fish, pigeon fanciers use their rubber rims to attach notes to birds’ legs and challenging-up thrill-seekers fill them with low cost rum to smuggle into nightclubs.
“Police in central Havana are pretty much on a war footing taking care of the brawls produced within the large crowds that aspire to buy the longed-for tuber,” wrote Cuban author Miriam Celaya in a tongue-in-cheek blog entry quoted by the Miami Herald.
Cuba"s condom shortage raises fears of imminent overall health crisis
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