When this March 24 marks the third anniversary of the arrival of the coronavirus in Ciego de Ávila, Dr. Alberto Moronta Enrique may remember the drastic change that his life brought about at that time, when breathing without difficulty was already good news for anyone person.

Born in Camagüey, former leader of the FEU, graduated in Medicine and specialist in Nephrology, Dr. Moronta had to assume the direction of the Antonio Luaces Iraola hospital, in Ciego de Ávila, in really hard times. He had only been deputy director of Medical Assistance for months when hospital services collapsed, as a result of a wave of infections by COVID-19, which led the Ministry of Public Health to designate him as head of the center.

«The position of director came in a difficult context, in which it was necessary to make changes in the organization management structures at the province level, and I had to assume a task for which I was preparing on the fly, sometimes empirically», remember the doctor.

Since then, the young doctor felt the responsibility of directing a very complex institution and a diverse and numerous work group on his shoulders. He knew, without anyone having to explain it to him, what it was like to carry the weight of life (or death) of the patients who entered the hospital every day hoping that it was not too late to save themselves.

It reflected the local newspaper Invasor for those days that not a few nights, while the hospital facility experienced a focus of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, Dr. Moronta was, in addition to being a director, an orderly. And it is not difficult to imagine the dark circles, the stress or the desire to kiss the wife and the young son, when the end of the pandemic seemed further away.

Today the Avilanian doctor knows how to carry the enormous burden of running a health center with a little more confidence and tranquility, and he juggles sharing his day-to-day life between this task and trips to the Majagua municipality, where he was recently nominated as a candidate for deputy.

«As public servants we also owe ourselves to the health of Cubans and we attend to the needs, dissatisfactions and main concerns of the population, related above all to the health-disease process,» explains Moronta Enrique.

If elected in the next elections, the young doctor will represent in the National Assembly of People’s Power many of the patients who one day received oxygen and hope thanks to the army of white coats that he himself leads. (Neilan Vera Rodriguez, ACN)