Former world junior javelin champion Marisleysis Duharte Morell denounced the abandonment of the Cuban government and sports authorities in the midst of their battle once morest a chronic rheumatic and autoimmune disease.
The former athlete from Santiago recalled that, when she began her sports life, she was “a healthy, happy and full of life person.”
The 22-year-old, world champion in the javelin throwing modality in 2017 and who contributed to the national medal table on several occasions, denounced that today at INDER “nobody remembers me, or who I am, or who I was and much less than what I contributed as an athlete to the nation”.
At age 18, Duharte was diagnosed with scleroderma, a chronic autoimmune disease that causes the skin to thicken and harden from a buildup of scar tissue that can also damage internal organs such as the heart and blood vessels, lungs, stomach and kidneys.
The disease is of unknown origin and affects one in 50,000 people. Currently, there are no drugs or other forms of treatment that can cure scleroderma.
“I don’t get help anywhere from the people I expected or from the institution where I was, in our country they talk regarding human rights but right now I don’t know where they are (…) I can’t walk, I can hardly I can move from one place to another and the economic aid that I receive and that was 1,088 Cuban pesos before, now they left it to me without further ado, in 808 without any explanation, which is not enough for me for food or medicine,” he denounced. the young woman
Las denunciations of former Cuban athletes and sports glories by the abandonment of the authorities are not isolated.
Last June, Osvaldo Lara, one of Cuba’s leading sprinters in the 1970s and 1980s, denounced that “they forgot regarding me, with so many years in the national team”.
“He has no retirement because when he started with the hypertension he got scared. He got desperate and asked to leave work. Then he had a stroke,” said his wife, who said that the 66-year-old former athlete survives with 700 pesos that the government gives him for one of his medals.
The Olympic medalist and multiple world judo champion Asley González, was dispossessed by the Cuban authorities of part of a property in his native Placetas, Villa Clara, obtained precisely as a reward for his sporting merits.
The former high-performance speed canoe athlete, Lisandra Torres Castillo, who lives in a house in very bad conditions constructively with her young daughter, her grandmother and her brother, she has been waiting for a response from Vivienda en Cienfuegos since 2016.
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