These teams of youth--preceded by similar numbers arriving from Santa Clara and followed by a large contingent from Santiago de Cuba, each with their distinctive T-shirts in different colors--are part of a gigantic popular social mobilization that is being organized to eradicate dengue fever on the island.

Dengue is carried by a particular mosquito, the Aedes aegypti, that breeds especially in unsanitary accumulations of water in towns and cities.

The last dengue outbreak in Cuba occurred in 1981, when 158 people died, mainly children. In 1981, the government reported at the time, the disease was deliberately introduced from outside Cuba. There were huge billboards depicting the mosquito inside the letters CIA, with the slogan, "We'll smash it!" The current outbreak is different, they explain--the result of a increase in the disease in the Caribbean and other regions with tropical and subtropical climates. The capitalist economic and social crisis in the semicolonial world today breeds the kinds of conditions in which this disease can flourish.

Cuba has not escaped the mosquito-transmitted epidemic that is on the rise in surrounding countries. But because of the social mobilization of the youthful anti-dengue campaigners and the population as a whole, the Caribbean island has been able to avoid the effects experienced by countries nearby and further afield. Only two people in Havana have died as a result.  
 
What a revolution makes possible
The mass popular campaign and the atmosphere it has generated throughout the city is only possible because workers and farmers have taken power and a popular revolutionary government is in place. The campaign is covered daily in the press and on TV, and is organized through the various mass organizations of the Cuban people.

"There are literally thousands of anti-dengue campaigners working in Havana today," said Yoandri Pérez, who hails from Las Tunas and studies at the Holguín school. "They include students at the different schools for social workers, members of voluntary construction contingents, doctors and nurses, members of the Communist Party and Union of Young Communists, and local government workers."

Pérez, 21, Yasmeli Díaz, 19, and Dayena López, 19, are among the 2,000 students from the Holguín school of social workers who traveled to Havana as part of the mobilization to beat the epidemic.

"We've been sent to Havana because this is where the most serious problem is," Díaz, who is from Ciego de Avila, explained. "There are 200 of us from Ciego de Avila, 300 from Las Tunas, 700 from Camagüey, and 800 from Holguín."

The campaign has accelerated practical training for these students, about 80 per cent of whom have never been to Havana before. The Holguín anti-dengue campaigners were organized into 15 companies, one for each of Havana's municipalities, although Díaz highlighted Old Havana, Central Havana, Playa, and La Lisa as the four districts most affected by the epidemic and where the campaigners have been concentrated.

"We originally came for a week but we're prepared to stay as long as is necessary," said López, also from Ciego de Avila. "The first to come from outside Havana were the 1,000 or so students at the school of social work in Villa Clara. Now we've arrived."

Díaz, López, and Pérez, all members of Cuba's Union of Young Communists (UJC), were part of a team of four headed up by José Herrada, 38, from Havana, who were going house-to-house in the Miramar district of Playa. They were welcomed by local residents, who have followed intently the progress of the campaign and have joined it in different ways. The four took time out of their inspection rounds to talk to the Militant about the anti-dengue campaign and the social workers school.

"We work 12 hours a day, seven days a week" Herrada said. He was a member of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces until 1997, when he took a job in the Ministry of Health. "The ministry of health needs its own cadres, as the current mobilization demonstrates," he explained.

A member of the Communist Party, Herrada was a soldier in Angola, after hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers answered the call to defend that African nation against an invasion by the South African apartheid regime. Herrada's job in the current campaign is to head up the team and train the youth to recognize the Aedes aegypti mosquito and how to deal with it.  
 
Campaigners in neighborhoods
"Hundreds of dengue campaigners come to an area and then we break up into teams of four," Herrada said. "We go house to house inspecting water tanks and other places where the mosquito might breed. If we discover eggs in a water tank, we pour alcohol over the water and set it alight, thereby destroying the eggs. Another team will come later to check the results of our work. And a third team does the fumigation. Every house is visited at least once a week by each of the three teams.

"Part of our work is also educational. We explain the need to live in a way that's conducive to keeping dengue at bay: keeping homes clean, disposing of rubbish in the correct manner. The Ministry of Health has issued literature as part of this education effort and we have organized meetings where local residents can talk out what's needed to eradicate the disease.

"In exceptional circumstances, if a particular household consistently refuses to act responsibly, we can issue a fine of 300 to 1,200 pesos," Herrada said. But it's not fines or regulations that are going to crack the problem, the four explained. It's through persuasion, social mobilization, and changes to the way people live that advances are being registered.

The four explained that the campaign has already scored important advances. "The infestation has declined but we won't be satisfied until we've reduced it to zero," Pérez said.

"A knock-on effect of the anti-dengue campaign is that we're generally making Havana a nicer place to live," said López. "It's being cleaned up, and the fumigation is killing all sorts of pests--such as other mosquitoes and insects, and even rats."  
 
Schools for revolutionary social workers
During their stay in Havana, the campaigners from Las Tunas are being housed in dormitories in the Havana school for social workers in nearby Cojímar. "We don't receive any special payment, just the 50 pesos per month we get in Holguín for the 10-month duration of the course," Yasmeli Díaz reported.

Asked what they thought of the school for social workers, López replied, "Marvelous! Yasmeli and I had ended our pre-university schooling and then spent one year doing nothing. We had no job, just hung around the house. Now, having entered the school to train revolutionary social workers, we're studying society, law, politics, psychology, sociology, computing, physics, and English and Spanish. When we graduate we're guaranteed a job as social workers in the neighborhood where we live."

The Holguín school is one of four around the country. The other three are in Santa Clara, Santiago de Cuba, and Havana. The schools were one of a series of projects established last year on the initiative of the national government to address two challenges. One involved the social inequalities and related problems that have arisen in Cuba's cities as a result of the effects of the Special Period, the term used here to describe the sharp economic and social crisis that gripped Cuba in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the regimes in Eastern Europe, with which most of Cuba's trade was conducted. The other was the fact that there were large numbers of young people who had left school but neither joined the workforce nor found a place at the university.

"Special voluntary social work was initially organized by the UJC," López explained. "Then it was decided to launch the four schools." Students spend about a year getting intense training. The schools are well supplied with teaching equipment, including videos, overhead projectors, computers, and the like. They have their own child-care centers and mini-hospital with beds and a medical crew of doctors, nurses, and dentists that functions round the clock. Students live in, returning home for four days every two weeks if they live locally, or every 25 days if they live further afield.

Before he entered the school Pérez was doing his military service. He decided to enter when his service was up after hearing an appeal by the Union of Young Communists.

"Of course, it's much better if social workers tackling such questions as people without jobs, alcoholism, problems faced by old people and children, come from the area concerned. We have a hands-on knowledge of the conditions. And the anti-dengue campaign is not just important to clear up the disease. It's important for our own education, a lesson that we'll use in the future. It's the first really practical experience that we've had as a school and we'll all come out of it stronger."
 
 
Related article:
Nationwide Cuban book fair expands education and culture  
 
 
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