The same ones we met knocking on doors in La Quebradita, asking about the hypertensive, the asthmatic, the child with a fever. The same ones who climbed hills with a light backpack and an infinite load of humanity.
But now they don’t go up: they run, they leave without time, without rest, without guarantees. They wrap themselves in their medical robes – as if they were invisible cloaks – and throw themselves against disaster.
There is no protocol that is enough when life slips through the fingers, and even so, they improvise, resist, save.
We saw them do it before: Lidia talking until her death as if she were an old acquaintance, refusing to let her in; or Yanara opening the door at dawn because someone was knocking urgently; and Jorge, telling how a girl was born against all logic in the middle of nowhere.
Now those stories are repeated, but with the tremor still beating under the feet.
An old man rescued from the ruins in Catia, a woman being treated in the middle of the street, with dust still falling from her face, a child who breathes again thanks to hands that did not ask where he came from, but where he could return.
They don’t have all the necessary resources, they don’t have rest. Cuba cannot send riches to this tragedy, but years ago it sent something more difficult to sustain: men and women capable of staying when everything collapses.
In the hills, people do not call them by name, they point to them with a mixture of faith and urgency, as if they were the last frontier between life and oblivion.
“Here come the Cubans,” they say. And in that phrase there is relief, there is hope, there is something like a miracle.
They are not gods, but on days like these, when the earth betrays and the sky does not respond, they are too much more useful.
