By Eduardo N. Cordoví Hernandez
HAVANA TIMES – Today I woke up feeling very pensive. Actually, I think I wake up more like this every day. After making some plans about my activities for the day, checking my WhatsApp, my email, my Messenger, and the main news on Google, it was around nine-thirty a.m.
I grabbed my ration book and went to get the daily bread roll. On the way, I saw many people at the pharmacy, a sign that the monthly medicines had been restocked. When I arrived at the place that supplies the bread and showed my document, I got the response that the bread was already gone. But if the bakers work all night making bread, how could it be gone by twenty to ten? So, I asked did they not make the full amount, or is there an electrical issue in the production area…? No, we don’t have information about the reasons… What time do you think…? I don’t know, come back in the afternoon.
I decided to return to the pharmacy and see which medicines were restocked. I have a prescription for Enalapril for high blood pressure and have a card called the Tarjetón that records monthly deliveries and matches a matrix held by the pharmacy employees. In normal times, if there was any transportation problem, factory supply issue, or delay in receiving the medicine from abroad, of course, for reasons beyond the consumer’s control, the following month or the next shipment within the current month, the patient wouldn’t lose their medication, and the Tarjetón was a means of control, defense, and demand.
But that was in normal times. Such procedures are now part of the past, something like history, which is no longer the case, and now it works differen