⁍ Cuba placed Havana back on a strict lockdown on Saturday following a rebound in coronavirus cases.

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⁍ Orderd restaurants, bars and pools once more to close, suspending public transportation and banning access to the beach.

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⁍ Cuba has been hailed as a rare success story in Latin America for its textbook handling and containment of its coronavirus outbreak.

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– Cuba is once again putting Havana on lockdown as it battles a resurgence of coronavirus, which has killed 88 people in the country this year. The country had eased lockdown restrictions last month after the number of cases dropped to a handful per day, but they have now risen back to April levels, with 59 cases reported on Saturday, reports Reuters. “We are witnessing a new epidemiological outbreak that puts our entire population at risk,” Cuban Health Minister José Angel Portal said during a daily coronavirus briefing on Saturday. The country’s free community-based health system has been credited for keeping the number of cases under 2,900 with 88 deaths for a population of 11 million, but authorities are now warning that the situation could become “uncontrollable” if authorities don’t act fast, reports the New York Times, which notes that many of the new cases are also imported, often from Venezuela. There is no open travel in Cuba due to the pandemic, so most returnees would likely be from the 20,000 health personnel stationed in Cuba’s leftist ally. Anyone entering the country is required to quarantine in a state facility for 14 days so contagion from those cases is contained. While Cuba’s outbreak is focused on Havana, Portal said authorities would need to monitor the rest of the country carefully given the large amount of asymptomatic carriers and nationwide travel that had occurred over the past month.