Havana, May 31 (RHC)-- Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel says that to the same extent that residents of Havana cooperate more, support more, and behaves in a more responsible way, the country will move forward.

This was the opinion of the president during the regular daily meeting he heads with Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz to evaluate the work of prevention and control of the new coronavirus.

Given the reality of this Friday, when Cuba registered 20 new positive cases of COVID-19 -- all of them in Havana -- the Cuban president insisted on the enormous responsibility that residents of the capital.  Referring to the three recent outbreaks that have been generated in the local transmission event opened in the municipality of Centro Habana: in the La Epoca store, the AICA Laboratory and the National Transportation Company of the Ministry of Internal Commerce, Diaz-Canel emphasized the need to "clearly explain to the people the moment we are in and why these situations have occurred."

The last two days, he said, "have been the worst of the last 21, both for Havana and for the country.  The behavior that has been manifesting itself, he said, tells us that it is Havana province where the tail and the epicenter of the pandemic are right now."

He also shared his appreciation that this week, mainly from Wednesday onwards, to the same extent that we have been making progress in reducing the number of cases, people are becoming overly confident and altering the concepts of social isolation raised.

Given this trend, he stressed that, although the country is already preparing the entire strategy for the recovery phase of the new coronavirus, it cannot be applied "until we are very sure that there is an exact control of the epidemic in order to move to a phase where we treat the disease as an endemic, because we are not going to destroy everything that has been working successfully in these times."