The priority attention that the country's top leadership gives to preventive work and support for the social sector was evident today during the meeting of the National Commission on Social Policies.

At the opening of the meeting, Eduardo Martínez Díaz, Vice Prime Minister of the Republic, insisted on the efforts that must be established from the grassroots so that the community itself identifies vulnerabilities and how to respond to them.

He noted that this work takes on special relevance at a time when, as of the end of August, more than 883,000 people are counted in vulnerable situations, a slight increase compared to April, and how in each place they are capable of providing individualized attention to the cases they have identified.

In this way, Martínez Díaz indicated keeping the lists updated, a task that demands the greatest sensitivity and humanism since these are people and not numbers, as well as the action plans to proceed in the face of different social problems such as child exploitation, drug consumption, and violence, among other scourges that erode the community.

The representative of the Cuban Government also emphasized the social involvement that enterprises and new economic actors must have, and the use of new initiatives such as the Community Youth Network and other social projects to articulate a coordinated system that allows responding to the situations that arise in each place with its endogenous capacities.

He stressed that all this effort deployed to follow up on Social Policies in the country will be possible only through control and monitoring of each of the tasks, with specific officials who must answer for their compliance and the efforts they make or fail to make for their solution.

In one of the agenda items, Inés María Chapman Waugh, Vice Prime Minister of the Republic, presented the progress and challenges the country faces in implementing a program of Services for Comprehensive and Integrated Attention to Victims of Gender-Based Violence in the country.

She explained that this program is being promoted in 20 municipalities nationwide, at different phases in terms of conditions and capacities to undertake the task, and aims to provide a direct, free, and confidential channel for the protection of women in these situations.

Likewise, she specified, conditions exist to establish this assistance at a physical site in five of the municipalities—Boyeros, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Bayamo, and Bartolomé Masó—where what is planned to be called Orange Houses will be established.

On this point, Teresa Amarelle Boué, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party and secretary general of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), elaborated that the idea would be to bring together in the same space all the instances that intervene in a violence process, thus avoiding the revictimization of people and the loss of time, so that the pertinent decisions for the protection of those who turn to the institutions can be made immediately.

In another agenda item, the lack of knowledge on the part of sectors of the population about the conditions and procedures that configure scenarios of vulnerability and where to go was reiterated, for which it was proposed to place special emphasis on communication actions, also understood as the structures that make known to administration councils and popular council presidents the situations that may arise in each place.

The agenda was completed with the accountability reports of the Vedado Popular Council, in the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, and on the strengthening of the Public Health system in the capital, sections in which, although progress was evident, much remains to be achieved, although good experiences are glimpsed in this regard that should guide future work.

Esteban Lazo Hernández, president of the National Assembly of People's Power, accompanied the meeting via videoconference, as did the working groups in the provinces and other Party and Government authorities.