On December 3, the day of Latin American Medicine, the inhabitants of Santa Lucia, a town in the municipality of Cabaiguán in the central Cuban province of Sancti Spíritus, surprised doctor Miguel Alexander Concepción López with a ceremony in which poets, country improvisers were not lacking, plus a very special surprise: a Suzuki motorcycle as a gift.
“No authorities or mobilization were involved,” indicated teacher Sandra Luciano, a neighbor of Santa Lucia and promoter of the idea behind the doctor’s back of a group on Facebook they named “Doctor of Santa Lucia lives on the red line” which was joined by the specialist’s family. Not only people from Santa Lucia joined but also from neighboring areas, from Cuatro Esquinas, Cabaiguán, Sancti Spíritus.
Gathered in a crowd in front of the specialist’s house, the neighbors waited for the doctor, who, not understanding what was happening, stunned and excited, witnessed the ceremony, in which he was the protagonist.
“Beyond the material, what gave me the most satisfaction was seeing so many people who went there, practically alone, on their own. They organized the schedule, they waited, some had even been waiting for a long time…it’s amazing, “said Dr. Concepción López.
“The initiative was born out of pain,” said Sandra Luciano, and the journalist from Radio Sancti Spíritus, Elsa Ramos, tells it on her Facebook profile.
“I called on the people, so many grateful people for the care he gave to so many sick people in the community because it was a very tough month with COVID. The call was to contribute what they could: from 20, 50 pesos for a gift for the doctor,” Luciano recalls.
For the teacher, it all began in October, when her family, consisting of her husband, a young son, and her 85-year-old mother, with dementia, tested positive for COVID-19. After 23 days fighting the infection, her mother passed away.
But, during the whole process they had been accompanied by the specialist, who “could not do more because God decided that it could not be done,” affirmed Luciano, who narrated how Miguel Alexander Concepción López visited them in the morning and in the evening, “he was completely devoted, every day I asked him if she was better until Friday evening and she died on Saturday.”
“They were very difficult moments,” said the specialist: “I held out my hand. It was difficult to see so many people who were sick, who had already had COVID, were at home and I decided to help the community doctors. Sometimes the mere fact of being close to them, guiding them in what to do, is extremely important.”
It was thus that seeing “Ale’s situation in his coming and going to the hospital, because he is a surgeon at the Camilo Cienfuegos Provincial Hospital, so many people looking for him even during his leisure time, we talked as a family about the idea of rewarding him, but we talked about bringing people together, whoever would like to join, to buy a motorbike,” narrated, for her part, the promoter of the popular initiative.
“As it grew, I, who have been a teacher in the community since I was 18 years old, thought: ‘I can’t do this on my own.’ So I selected a worker from the Banco Popular de Ahorro, Maibi Garcés; she was the treasurer. There was an audit of this money with members of the group on November 25, we tried to do it with all the transparency that a town needs. We collected 256,240 pesos,” the teacher said.
According to Sandra, they also “stimulated” another doctor from the Provincial Hospital known as Chichi, who had also helped in this stage of the epidemic.
“I tell the world without lying and whoever I have to tell, that I have lived only two moments like this, which was the birth of my two children. Nothing compares to the emotion I experienced that day. I believe that my mother has accompanied me in all these moments to give me this strength and wherever she is I know that she will be satisfied with this wonderful gesture. The gift itself was never that Suzuki; the gift, as we told him, is him, which is a privilege, a blessing for all of us.”
