Early every morning, Jesús Villalonga heads out to the woods close to his residence in Cuba’s Matanzas province, east of Havana, to collect medicinal vegetation and gather his horse from the close by fields.
Villalonga, 77, is a curandero, a conventional healer. The horse is for his morning job, ferrying individuals round in a cart that serves as a taxi. Round noon, he returns to his residence within the Naranjal neighborhood for every day consultations with neighbors. Their illnesses decide which vegetation he’ll be foraging the following day.
Cuba has a protracted people historical past of utilizing medicinal vegetation in each Afro-Cuban non secular ceremonies and for the therapy of widespread illnesses. At the moment, with many prescribed drugs briefly provide—particularly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic—plant-based medicines and different therapies corresponding to acupuncture, cupping, and therapeutic massages have turn out to be more and more necessary.
Cuba’s economic system has been ailing for many years, exacerbated by mismanagement, longtime United States sanctions, the collapse of the Soviet Union—Cuba’s former benefactor—in 1991, and restricted commerce with pleasant nations together with Venezuela, which has endured an financial disaster of its personal. Tighter U.S. restrictions throughout the Trump administration curtailed journey to the island and diminished the amount of cash and parcels that might be despatched from the mainland, each of which have been a supply of medicines. Most not too long ago, the pandemic has hobbled tourism, a significant income the federal government wants to purchase important provides.
“There are shortages of every thing,” says Richard Feinberg, a longtime Cuba scholar and professor emeritus on the College of California, San Diego. “Cuba doesn’t have the international alternate to import medicines or many different issues.”
Some Cubans develop their very own medicinal herbs within the countryside or on small city plots. Others seek the advice of curanderos corresponding to Villalonga or purchase plant-based medicines at authorities pharmacies and from non-public entrepreneurs.
Villalonga started utilizing pure treatments when he was 14 and says that nobody taught him about herbs—he realized on his personal. “I can’t flip my again on anybody who must be cured,” he wrote in an e-mail, including that he’s offering sufferers with different therapies throughout the pandemic. He calls his expertise a present from God and by no means fees for his companies. Typically happy sufferers go away small presents corresponding to cigarettes or no matter else they’ll spare.
Because the pandemic drags on, Villalonga says he’s seeing many individuals affected by stress. “Now it’s approaching two years with everybody stressed, kids, the aged—everybody.”
Stress, he says, tends to exacerbate the herpes zoster virus, generally often called shingles, that may stay latent within the physique for years after somebody will get chickenpox. The U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention says there are numerous theories as to why the chickenpox virus will get reactivated however that individuals with compromised immune techniques appear to be extra vulnerable to the painful shingles rash.
Relying on the place the rash seems, Villalonga treats it with guava or guanabana leaves. He additionally gathers leaves from the tua tua plant and boils them right into a tea that he makes use of to deal with a wide range of diseases, corresponding to diabetes and gastritis. Amongst his different favourite plant curatives are sage for individuals with respiratory issues, cedar for lung illnesses, bloodroot for cleaning the physique, wild heliotrope for kidney stones, and lime and chamomile for upset stomachs.
Villalonga’s therapies at all times contain passing his arms over the sufferers’ our bodies, a follow widespread to varied non secular traditions. Placing hands-on, Villalonga says, permits him to “really feel” the illnesses. When touching the again of a affected person’s leg, for instance, he says he can inform what has upset the individual’s abdomen so he can put together an natural treatment that can take away obstructions within the alimentary canal and promote therapeutic.
The mainstreaming of inexperienced medication in Cuba
The World Well being Group famous in a 2019 report on “Conventional and Complementary Medication” that Cuba has had a nationwide well being plan for integrating pure and conventional medication into its well being service supply system since 1995 and likewise has a nationwide analysis workplace in Havana to check pure medicines.
Cuba first started encouraging the usage of medicinal vegetation and different medication throughout the financial disaster often called the Particular Interval, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lack of its beneficiant subsidies. The federal government continued to help inexperienced options, manufacturing plant-based medicines in particular laboratories and distributing pure medicines by way of its community of pharmacies.
Within the province of Las Tunas, for instance, farmers develop plantains, passionflower, mint, guava, lemons, oregano, and different herbs to produce 5 laboratories with greater than 35,000 kilos of plant materials yearly which are reworked into extracts, syrups, drops, lotions, and tinctures, in response to Granma, Cuba’s Communist Social gathering publication. These merchandise are sometimes extra available in state-owned pharmacies than prescribed drugs.
State-licensed medical doctors frequently supply sufferers different therapies, and household medical doctors and nurses who’re assigned to particular neighborhoods are inspired to plant herb gardens close to their workplaces.
When Maura Pérez Recio, 53, was finding out medication from 1986 to 1992, pure medicines and different therapies weren’t a part of the curriculum. Now, Pérez, who works at Cuba’s Nationwide Institute of Endocrinology, in Havana, is accredited for acupuncture and natural medication therapies and consists of them as a part of her therapeutic arsenal. She says she may prescribe varied types of garlic and onions to decrease lipid ranges, moringa and basil preparations as hypoglycemic brokers for the therapy of sort 2 diabetes, and linden and passionflower as sedatives.
Throughout the pandemic, she says, a nationwide marketing campaign has promoted the usage of PrevengHo-Vir, a homeopathic medication thought to spice up the immune system, and Cuban medical doctors have been prescribing vegetation, corresponding to turmeric, which have antiviral properties and stimulate the immune system.
“The Titan”
In an open house left by a collapsed constructing in Previous Havana, Julio Bienvenido Cisnero is doing a brisk enterprise at his small, picket consultorio medico, or medical consulting sales space, the place he sells every thing from sage to moringa, as soon as touted as a miracle plan, particularly for treating digestive system illnesses, by the late Cuba chief Fidel Castro.
Bienvenido, 68, is licensed by the federal government to develop and promote medical vegetation. He pays a state charge to make use of the open house the place he’s run his enterprise since Could 2010. He grows a few of the medicinal vegetation that he sells and buys different herbs from suppliers who come from the countryside.
A hand-lettered sign up Spanish above his show case says that he presents plant-based therapies for illnesses of the “kidney, liver, gall bladder, prostate, pores and skin, and different pathologies.”
Bienvenido says enterprise has picked up throughout the pandemic. Some clients purchase herbs to make their very own teas, salves, and different preparations to spice up their immune techniques. He rigorously counts out the variety of leaves they’ll want, wraps them in a sheet of previous newspaper, and explains the recipes. He additionally sells his personal preparations. Amongst them is one he calls the Titan, a drink combining seven medicinal vegetation: aloe vera, guanabana leaves, chaya, moringa, avocado leaves, candle bush, and leaves from the calabash tree. The Titan, he says, cleanses the physique.
Bienvenido says he realized about some medicinal vegetation from his grandmother and that the household’s data of people cures traces again to an ancestor introduced from Congo throughout the slave commerce to work within the sugarcane fields.
“All of the data from Africa has been handed from technology to technology,” he says by telephone, including that he updates his data by way of studying, pc analysis, and listening to a authorities radio program on inexperienced medication.
Different medical practices are “a means of returning to nature,” Pérez says, “particularly contemplating that individuals have the concept that plant-based therapies trigger fewer antagonistic reactions than chemical medication.”
Natalia Favre is an Argentinian documentary photographer and filmmaker based mostly in Cuba. Her work focuses on social points by way of the intersection between group and identification. Observe her on Instagram @nataliafavre_.
Freelance journalist Mimi Whitefield, based mostly in South Florida, coated Cuba, worldwide enterprise, and different information from throughout Latin America for the Miami Herald. Observe her on Twitter @HeraldMimi.
