The corpse of a man had to be transferred to the funeral home in a truck due to the shortage of hearses in the Mella municipality, Santiago de Cuba.
Island activists denounced that the relatives of the deceased waited four hours for a hearse to take him from the hospital to the funeral home, and finally they had to manage a truck.
Internet user Librado Linares explained on Twitter that the event occurred in the Mella municipality, where there are currently no cars in service.
He also said that the box was made “badly at the last minute.”
A follower of the activist commented that in Cuba the dead can no longer be given a “Christian burial.” “The mourners can no longer even mourn their dead. They have to start managing a car, a box or even a common grave. We are sorry,” he lamented.
Last March, a Cuban denounced that, after a long wait for a hearse In Santiago de Cuba, her cousin’s husband had to have a wake at home without knowing when he would be transferred to the cemetery and without knowing where he would be buried.
The Community Services Company of that territory indicated that only has 10 hearses for the entire provincesix less than there were a year ago.
The situation is not exclusive to Santiago. In the Banes municipality, Holguín, they converted a tractor on funeral carriage due to the lack of vehicles to offer this service in the territory.
The critical situation of funeral services in Cuba not only includes the lack of cars to transport the coffins but also there’s no room in the vaults either to deposit the corpses, as it happens in the province of Artemisa.
Also a family must push the hearse to the Matanzas cemetery after the vehicle broke down during the burial. The deceased’s daughters shouted outraged at this fact: “Dad, you did not deserve this.”
Despite this reality, the Cuban regime began the charge for some obituary servicesmany of them unavoidable for the mourners, such as the interprovincial and intermunicipal transfer of the deceased.
According to the measure, reported by the newspaper Escambray of Sancti Spíritus, the government not only charges for the cremation of corpses and the transfer of deceased to other provinces, but it will also set a price for some benefits, among them, those related to the transfer of deceased between municipalities of the same province.
The collection of wakes at home is foreseen, for which the funeral home would provide the services related to the wake and the family would pay based on the approved price list and points of sale will be enabled to offer safekeeping, amphorae with better design and quality to keep the ashes of the deceased in the crematorium.
Likewise, “other types of coffins, of a better design, will be offered for those who wish and can acquire them, which does not mean that the State will stop putting the one that until now has kept for free”, and “the sale of fine flowers for the crown service at differentiated prices,” the newspaper announced this week.
