Thousands of children were cared for in Cuba after the Chernobyl explosion.
The beaches of Tarará are all you can expect from the Cuban Caribbean. Warm turquoise blue sea, idyllic palm trees on fine sand and ochre, soft breeze. A handful of low houses with gardens are arranged on a perfect grid just 30 kilometers east of Havana. In the center, a crude building with red paint stripped by saltpeter hides one of the lesser-known episodes of the Chernobyl disaster.
Built in the 1950s, the Tarará urbanization served as a summer neighborhood for the country’s bourgeois and military elite during Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship and later became a giant children’s sports camp for the José Martí Organization of Pioneers. But as of March 29, 1990, this paradisiacal resort would become the largest health program for children affected by the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant four years earlier.
Between 1990 and 2011, the Tarará pediatric hospital treated more than 25,000 children who were victims of radiation in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, most of them affected by cancer, deformities, muscular atrophy, dermatological problems and stomach problems. And many with high levels of post-traumatic stress for having experienced the nuclear horror.
In addition to the clinical facilities for those affected – which included two hospitals and some 20 medical branches in the professional category – the small city had a theatre, several schools and recreational areas stretching over almost two kilometres of crystal-clear beaches.
“Fidel told me ‘I don’t want you to be going to the press, nor do I want the press to be going to the consulate. This is an elementary duty that we are doing with the Soviet people, with a brother people. We’re not doing it for publicity,'” says Cuban ex-consul Sergio Lopez in the documentary ‘Chernobyl in us.
Almost 30 years after Fidel Castro himself received the first contingent of 139 children at the foot of the plane’s steps, a recent agreement signed between the Cuban Ministry of Health and the Ukrainian government opens the door to a possible re-edition of the program coinciding with the attention aroused by the HBO series on Chernobyl.
The Cuban News Agency announced that a new group of 50 Ukrainian children, many of them children of those who in the early 1990s lived the same experience in the Caribbean nation, will travel to Havana in 2019 to treat their ailments.
The ‘anti-radiation’ beach.
For years, the beaches of Tarará were populated by rubicundas girls and pale boys that habaneros became accustomed to seeing sunbathing on the beach outside the summer season.
On the morning of April 26, 1986, a series of fatal errors affected the reactor number 4 of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin atomic power plant, whose core of the reactor was exposed throwing a large amount of radioactive material in the middle of several explosions and an intense fire that lasted ten days.
Pripyat, a city of 50,000 people built to house the facility’s workers and their families, was not evacuated until 36 hours after the explosion. Hundreds of thousands of adults and children were exposed to the contamination. Many of the children then developed thyroid cancer and leukaemia, probably through inhalation or ingestion of iodine 131 or celsium 173.
The patients used to be “carriers of more than one chronic disease,” accompanied by severe psychological alterations, according to a study conducted by Cuban doctors Julio Medina, coordinator for years of the Program; and Omar Garcia, researcher at the Center for Radiation Protection and Hygiene. That is why they classified the affected in four groups, from the most serious, which could stay for months on the island, to the “relatively healthy” of group IV, which stayed between 45 and 60 days.
For years, the beaches of Tarará were populated by rubicundas girls and pale boys that habaneros became accustomed to seeing sunbathing on the beach outside the summer season. Tanning and submerging in seawater was a complementary part of the melagenin and pilotrophin treatment they received to improve skin pigmentation and hair growth.
“I can say, without exaggeration, that for us Cuba has been the salvation,” says young mother Natasha Salimova while rocking her child with cerebral palsy in a trolley, in a piece of the Associated Press of 1999, where you can see the Cuban clinic in operation.
Miracle in Special Period
Miracle in Special Period
