One can get them sterilized, polished inside antiseptic wrappings and of whatever size and type is desired. No one asks where they come from. In Cuban cemeteries, a singular and grotesque traffic in orthopedic pins has been going on for years. Unscrupulous individuals are digging up bodies from the island's cemeteries to remove the pins, which are used to repair fractures and which are unobtainable from the Communist island's disastrous health system. At the time the reporting for this story was originally done in 1995, the pins were going for between $10 and $30 in the black market. If you could get that much money together, you would be able to get a pin and take it to a doctor at a state hospital so they could operate on your loved one. Otherwise, they would have to live with an inoperable fracture.
Once upon a time, grave diggers and their associates in this macabre business would wait the normal two years (before digging up a body and placing the bones in a niche) to remove the pins. But, an increase in demand prompted by the country's deteriorating economy and inability to import many essential medical supplies has led some of the pin traffickers to speed up the schedule and caused the practice to spread. Our investigation led us to Havana's Colón Cemetery, Santa Calra's Marta Abreu Cemetery and Cienfuegos' Tomás Acea Cemetery, where we found that the traffic in orthopedic pins was only the most recent sideline of an illicit business which includes trafficking in jewelry and clothing stripped from corpses.
In order to identify which graves may contain the orthopedic pins, traffickers use a network of informants in hospitals, doctor's offices and funeral homes. When such intelligence is unavailable, they dig up the bodies of people who were old when they died and hack them apart in hopes of finding a pin. The pins in question are normally used on patients who are 60 or older who have suffered severe fractures. There are various types, but the most prized are the ones used to repair hip bones.
Desperate relatives sometimes go directly to the cemeteries, where deals are discreetly struck with the grave robbers. Sometimes, they are referred to intermediaries. Sometimes, the relatives bring with them the name and tomb location of a recently deceased pin bearer. It is not unusual for orthpedic surgeons or other physicians to refer realtives of fracture victims to cemeteries or morgues, where pins from the freshly dead may also be obtained. ''I lived through that. It's a monstrosity,'' said Dr. Alfredo Melgar, who was forced to leave Cuba in 1995 after he criticized the national health system.
It's sad for Cuban doctors to have to forget their professional ethics and their morality in order to help people to survive.'' Melgar, an internal medicine specialist at the Hospital Provincial in Camaguey, said the phenomenon of the orthopedic pin traffic has nothing to do with the U.S. economic embargo. Instead, he blames ''a health system which doesn't work due to poor administration'' and the policy of privileges in health services practiced by the Cuban government.
''It's a disgrace that Cuban specialists are winning international awards for orthopedic innovations and that the government is not giving people what is easily found at Cira García, Frank País and CIMEQ (hospitals with units reserved for the government elite or paying tourists),'' said Melgar. While some are scandalized by the traffic in orthopedic pins, other consider it akin to an organ donation, albeit involuntary. ''It should be legal, like with organs,'' said Luis Castellanos, 77, of Havana, who was waiting for his son to buy him a pin so he could get his hip fixed.
At the time of this investigation, the Cuban authorities were considering authorizing the removal of pins from bodies, with the consent of relatives, in order to remedy the severe scarcity of orthopedic supplies. Given the progressive degeneration of Cuban society of which this phenomenon is only a symptom, it would hardly be surprising to one day see grave shops shops offer, for dollars only, gold teeth, bones for Santeria rituals, jewelry, used caskets and whatever else may be extracted from the graves of the hapless dead.
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