The mother of a one-year-old killed in a Cuban clinic after receiving a routine vaccination launched an awareness campaign Tuesday urging social media users to share a photo of her in the hope that the communist regime gives her answers.
Cuba’s health ministry initially vowed an investigation into Paloma Dominguez Caballero’s death; last week, state media published a report essentially absolving the government of any wrongdoing, categorically stating that nothing was wrong with the vaccine Dominguez received.
Dominguez was one of five children identified to have an intense “adverse” reaction to a routine measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination at the same Havana clinic between the days of October 7-8. Dominguez was the only one the Castro regime identified as having lost her life after receiving the MMR vaccine. Dominguez died on October 9.
Cuba’s healthcare system has been dangerously ill-equipped to provide for the Cuban people for decades. Cuba sends its best doctors to work for free around the world in a “slave doctor” system that nets the regime as much as $11 billion a year while investing minimally in its healthcare system at home. The “slave doctor” program also serves as propaganda touting Cuba’s alleged advances in medicine, regurgitated religiously by Western socialists seeking to impose state-run healthcare systems in their own countries. The Cuban healthcare system is also rapidly running out of basic medicine because the economy it exploits to keep afloat, that of Venezuela, is also collapsing under the weight of socialist mismanagement.
Cuban doctors who denounce the shortcomings of the communist healthcare system often find themselves imprisoned.
Mother Yaima Caballero posted several messages on her Instagram account – previously dedicated to posting photos and videos of Paloma Dominguez – explaining her decision to continue to pressure the Castro regime for a precise explanation on what killed her daughter, Diario de Cuba reported on Tuesday.
“Many people are helping me protest using the internet, it is the only thing I can do now. But the person making this happen suggests that I ask friends who want to help me to change their profile pictures and use the one of my baby with the wings,” she wrote. “This is not easy for me, but [it is] at least something, to put pressure on at all sides. Please, do it for her, not for me, change their profile photos in all your accounts and help me with this photo of her. Let’s start there.”
She then posted the photo she wished social media users would share of her late daughter.
“Join my protest and make this your profile photo on all social media, please let those sons of whores who killed my girl see it and wherever they look, let them see this picture,” she wrote. “Let them see her to see if it reaches someplace and they do something for us and for her. This photo and along with it the word ‘justice.'”
The top comment in response to her post reads, “I recommend that you consider leaving the country soon the government will block your accounts and isolate you on the internet. I hope to God I keep seeing you and find out what happened.”
Caballero has no publicly known record of opposition to the communist regime. Cuba punishes anyone who publicly disagrees with or criticizes the regime under the crime of desacato, or “contempt.” Cuban state police also routinely arrest and disappear dissidents without offering them or their families any reason for doing so.
Caballero has previously accused the government of “killing” Dominguez in social media messages posted in the immediate aftermath of her death, when reports indicated that as many as 24 children were affected and another had died. Cuba’s Public Health Ministry has since clarified that only five children are officially documented as having been affected and only Dominguez died, though Havana has a long history of falsifying medical records to appear to have a more successful healthcare system before the world than it actually has. Cuban slave doctors that have escaped the system have said that, while working abroad, the Castro regime forced them to invent patients and throw away perfectly good medicine to boost the statistics on the number of patients Cuban doctors actually treat. Cuba has for years also faced accusations of officially labeling stillborn children “abortions” to claim one of the world’s lowest infant mortality rates.
CubaDebate, a state media outlet, published an alleged explanation for Dominguez’s death last week that identified no wrongdoing on the part of any medical staff or any cause of death for the child. It did provide more details on what Dominguez’s last moments were like: vomiting, fever, swelling in the area of the vaccine, and toxic shock.
“The vaccine is not the problem,” Rafael Pérez Cristiá, the head of the Cuban Center for State Control of Medicines, Equipment, and Medical Devices (CECMED), is quoted as saying in the report. “It is a triple viral vaccine that protects against three grave disease which, thanks to its use, are now eliminated in the country.”
The CECMED authorities, whose responsibility it is to ensure that faulty vaccines are not administered in the country, said the vaccine that killed Dominguez was part of a package of 43,630 doses that did not otherwise hurt children outside of the one clinic in which the five identified cases occurred. They do not explain why Dominguez died, hinting that her disposition was too delicate for the vaccine, but not explaining how no doctor identified this vulnerability.
The report includes an infographic encouraging parents to continue receiving the MMR vaccine with confidence.
In the West, the MMR vaccine has been falsely linked with autism, in part because the signs of autism tend to appear at the age of 1. “Vaccine safety experts, including experts at CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), agree that MMR vaccine is not responsible for increases in the number of children with autism,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) affirms.
Outside of the West, particularly in Africa, measles has become increasingly common as locals do not trust Western-based aid groups administering vaccines and ongoing paramilitary conflicts keep health workers from delivering vaccines. Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – currently enduring the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history – is also experiencing a measles outbreak, also the world’s worst known ongoing outbreak of any disease, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).