CubitaNOW write ~ Thursday, July 20, 2023

Cuban artist Ivan Carbonel Machuti, who resides in the Florida municipality of Camaguey Province, is in a terrible state.

His parents died during one of the worst phases of the epidemic in Cuba. He was unable to be in the cemetery when they were buried due to the restrictions in place at the time.

Two years later, when Carbonell goes for an exhumation, he discovers that his mother’s body belonged to someone else. In fact, it is a man’s body.

Evan sent a letter to the CubitaNow editorial staff explaining everything that happened:

In the difficult period of Covid-19 that crossed Cuban territory and the world, my parents were admitted to the Manuel Beto Fajardo Municipal Hospital. There, unfortunately, my mother, Ines Guerra Lombeda, died in the early morning of July 4th. According to the opinion, she did not die from covid.

Two days later, my father, Felix Carbonel Sanchez, passed away. Upon hearing the tragic news, I went to the hospital where they were admitted to say my final farewells to those responsible for my life and talent. On reaching the place, they told me that my father’s body should wait in the mortuary until that day because there was no body to take to the sacred field for its rest.

After the allegations, a funeral home van showed up but there were no hospital staff to load the box. They told me I had to carry the box unprotected, which I refused because I might have been infected. In the end, this person from the hospital appeared to carry the box and the issue was resolved.

In this complicated circumstance, family members were not allowed to go to the cemetery for fear of being infected with the virus that has claimed many human lives. That is, the body was walking on its own!

For two years I always brought flowers to the grave of my dear parents. It was time for the exhumation to remove the remains to be placed in a proper place, but what a surprise it was to my eyes when they opened my mother’s vault, for it was not her, it was a man. I spontaneously requested to meet with the cemetery director, so I asked him to look in the burial book as there was supposedly a control and my mother’s name or whereabouts did not appear. The official said the body was taken from the hospital to the cemetery without a burial certificate.

I met with the administrative authorities of the province and informed them of my complex situation. I also met the municipal director of communal areas, who said he would solve the problem and that the next day he would be at the cemetery to give me an answer. He asked me for a week to be quiet. At the end of the week, I went to the cemetery hoping for a satisfactory answer that the remains had turned up and the clerk told me there was still nothing.

I have to wait for the end of July, when the exhumations are over, and if they don’t show up, see if the body is buried in another commune.

I wonder is there no check in the burial book?

How long will it take to find out where my mother’s remains are?

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