CAMAGÜEY.- Cuba will present again to the UN the traditional report that demands the need to put an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the United States against our people. Yes, because sometimes words disguise the true semantics of the linguistic field of life. Because that first world-wide and powerful asphyxia that we denounce as a country every year in each tribune on any date, we suffer it as children, as parents, as grandparents, as neighbors, as acquaintances, as a people.

For this reason, fatigue never appears. We could believe that the vote is mere symbolism, that in the end they ignore our arguments and our truth, that we are isolated and trapped in numbers and an audience. But not. Despite their solvency and hegemony, the isolated and trapped will turn out to be themselves. Dignity, we know, is not a financial value.

But then you know of a mother who asks for ketotifen for her little child's allergy in support groups on WhatsApp; of the young woman who advocates antibiotics for the cardiac brother's lymphangitis; of the grandson who manages mafenide to relieve grandfather's bedsores; of the daughter who cries out for metoclopramide to hold the mother's food inside, those also scarce and that a pancreatic cancer insists on giving back.

And then you suppress any doubt. It exists. It accompanies us every step we try to take. It slows us down. It drives us. It suffocates us, but it also oxygenates our purposes.

The blockade is as an overwhelming and hostile reality as the 242 aggressive measures promoted by the Donald Trump administration and which remain in force; like the so-called fourth generation war of which we are a permanent target. Public opinion can be manipulated from the Internet and social networks, and this is well defined by the Pentagon. Recent examples abound.

If even in the midst of a pandemic that forces seclusion and public restraint there are numerous world caravans and social movements and organizations that express themselves in support of our cause, here we cannot allow ourselves to be reluctant or apathetic. Of insistence and perseverance we are made. And this June 23 we will return to that stage with all the honor that reason assists us.

From April 2019 to March 2020, the blockade represented the loss of more than 5 billion dollars for Cuba. According to last year's report, it was the first time that the amount of damages exceeded that figure, clear evidence of growing harassment. All this without "calculating" the accounting consequences of such a siege in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the current calendar, according to Granma's review, we also surpassed these numbers in the affectations.

Díaz-Canel made it clear in the closing speech of the Eighth Party Congress:

"No one with a minimum of honesty and with economic data that are in the public domain can ignore that this fence constitutes the main obstacle to the development of our country and to advance in the search for prosperity and well-being."

If we are honest and read, we cannot doubt. But life is not simplified in that formula. Perhaps that mother, that sister, that grandson, that daughter do not understand honesty or financial data due to the impossibility of adding to the well-being of their loved ones.

I may hesitate myself as I drill the next needle for a new Maternal and Child Program protocol. The absence of a reagent makes it impossible to rule out the possibility of gestational diabetes, a procedure that I resolved when my pregnancy premiere was one morning in 2017. Now they are more frequent and less accurate controls; punctures without disposable syringes; prenatals replaced with the supplement that appears.

Touch, at times, we keep counting to ten to continue. And it is also necessary to continue believing that we can start the account again, and breathe.

Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez