CAMAGÜEY.- "Blood donations ... imagine! That's saving lives. One day I had to donate blood, at the Pediatric Hospital, to a seven-year-old boy arm by arm, without asking for a name or anything ... For me, it was happiness, "he told us.

Because there are many like him, Camagüey hosted the national event for the day of the voluntary blood donor and received the status of National Vanguard. We met him there.

Jorge Luis Cancino Gómez, 64 years old, adds 206 times that he has extended his arm for such a noble task. "My late father told me: 'If you are a son of this country and this revolution and Fidel is going to donate, you have to donate'. I was only 15 years old. "

This example is also multiplied in territories such as Isla de la Juventud, Guantánamo, Holguín, Las Tunas and Pinar del Río, which were Outstanding in the systematic compliance of voluntary donations.

Regarding what distinguishes Camagüey’s territory, Reinaldo Pons Vázquez, provincial director of Public Health, highlighted the over-compliance of the plan of donations in each municipality and the contribution in 111% of plasma to the industry for the production of other blood products and medicines.

He stressed that the condition received is an acknowledgment to the work of thousands of people from different sectors have among their responsibilities to ensure the promotion of this task, the medical control of donors, the extraction of blood or plasma, and at the best of the cases, be one of the anonymous heroes.

To them, the 9805 active donor, conveyed the gratitude on behalf of the entire town, "especially of the more than 86,000 Camagüey’s patients surgically treated in 2018 with the guarantee of having the blood products that were needed, of those who saved their lives in a unit of attention to the serious or received a transfusion to recover from the anticancer treatment.

"Also of the children who suffer from chronic anemia and who sustain themselves thanks to the sensitivity of these valuable Cubans, as well as everyone who has received an organ transplant secured by multiple donations before, during and after the operation."

Camagüey has four municipal blood banks located in Florida, Nuevitas, Santa Cruz and Guáimaro; 12 fixed extraction centers, eight of them in municipal polyclinics and four in the municipal capital and 449 temporary extraction centers to where mobile equipment is moved.

This program in Cuba has more than 50 years of existence, thought and designed by Fidel, who summoned all good and healthy Cubans to voluntarily donate their blood anonymously to help save lives. In this way about half a million blood donations are made in the Island and in Camagüey more than 30 thousand each year.

Unlike the rest of the world, the day of celebration lasts for a week, since it begins on June 6 in commemoration of the first donation made by the Commander in 1970 to help the victims of the earthquake in Peru.

However, it is not until 2005, at the 58th World Health Assembly, where Health Ministers from around the world made a unanimous statement of commitment and support in favor of voluntary blood donations and instituted the World Day of the Donor.

The event would be held on June 14 of each year, in honor of the birth of Austrian doctor Karl Landsteiner, discoverer of human blood groups and Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1930, and for Cubans has the happy coincidence of the birth of two greats of History: Maceo and Che.