By Rosa Miriam Elizalde
Fidel Castro, at the foot of the plane’s steps, receives the first patients of the “Chernobyl Children” program.

Anticommunism surfs on the crest of the wave of debates that have accompanied HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries. Many of those who have rushed to call it the best television production of all time have reduced its indisputable artistic value to a utilitarian and simplistic reading that allows no other point of view than that of introducing into the Left a feeling of guilt of universal dimensions.

However, the story of the Chernobyl tragedy has other chapters that have been left out of the series and that transcend the nuclear accident, the trial of the Soviet bureaucrats who restricted the information of the facts and the suicide of the scientist Valery Legasov, director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and one of those who directed the damage control operation, tragic hero of the successful production of HBO.

Craig Mazin, the screenwriter, does not conceal his admiration for those who took it upon themselves, many at the cost of their own lives, to neutralize as much as possible the consequences of the atomic explosion. Firefighters, miners, construction workers, soldiers and ordinary civil servants worked under conditions of extreme radiation exposure.

The “liquidators” – as they were called – were not a horde of poor devils. “A mob of ignoramuses is of no use in such a complex accident. Most of them were nuclear physicists, geologists, uranium miners with experience in the manipulation of these substances, who knew perfectly well what they were exposed to”, reported the blog La pizarra de Yuri almost ten years ago. The surviving “liquidators” in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are still proud to have saved and to continue saving so many lives.

There is another story of the accident buried for decades along with the Chernobyl reactor. The radiation victims, for 21 consecutive years, traveled more than 9,000 kilometres to heal from the terrible aftermath on an Atlantic beach. The twenty-six thousand one hundred and fourteen affected, of which some 23,000 were children, occupied the houses of Tarará, a seaside resort of very white sands 27 kilometers from the Cuban capital, where, according to Ernest Hemingway, “the best jetty in Havana” is located.

Received by Fidel Castro at the foot of the plane’s stairs, the first patients arrived on March 29, 1990, to begin a project to provide comprehensive care for children affected by disasters, which also benefited victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake and Brazilians who handled a radioactive source of Cesium 137 in the city of Goiâgnia, another nuclear accident that contaminated hundreds of people in 1987, a year after Chernobyl and of which there is no mention.

Image of the exhibition “Lost documents: Chernobyl children in Cuba”.

Cuba was the only country that responded to the Ukrainian government’s call to attend the victims of the reactor with a massive and free health program, which included not only medical services and the follow-up of each case until final recovery, but also psychological and educational care. In addition to hospitals, classrooms and recreation centers were created in Tarará for children who needed long stays and who traveled to the island with family members and teachers.

via The Other Chernobyl Story