A recent video posted on social networks shows how a truck is used as an improvised hearse, due to the deteriorated state of the vehicle fleet intended for these services in Santiago de Cuba.
Local journalist Yosmany Mayeta denounced on Facebook the crisis of obituary services in the province and showed the video of a truck intended for mass passenger transportation who had to transport a coffin.
Santiago de Cuba currently has only two operational funeral vehicles to serve the entire deceased population, an unsustainable situation for a city of one million inhabitants that has been repeatedly denounced.
The conditions of these vehicles are terrible, forcing families to look for desperate alternatives to transport their loved ones.
The report indicates that the use of rented trucks to transport coffins is now a sad norm in Santiago de Cuba.
The deterioration of the service has been evident in multiple incidents: last month, a coffin fell from a hearse in the middle of the central avenue of Santiago, and on another occasion, it was possible to see how a funeral took place in the rainwith the coffin carried on the shoulders of mourners due to the lack of suitable vehicles.
In May 2023, José Borrero Sotomayor, provincial director of Communal Services, told the official newspaper Sierra Maestra that “funeral services continue to be subsidized by the State. The charges regulated by Resolution are charged: interprovincial transfers have a price of 4.00 pesos per kilometer traveled, cremation 340 pesos, exhumation 156 and floral arrangements – wreaths and bouquets – of according to the request of the mourner,” the official said then.
However, this is something that judging from the aforementioned experiences is not fulfilled.
According to the director, the province of Santiago de Cuba had only ten hearses last year, which was insufficient for a province of more than a million inhabitants and half of them residents in the main municipality.
