"The doctors left my son for dead in the polyclinic and justice was never served"

Zeriocha Melián is a doctor and mother of a young nurse, who died in Cuba due, according to the family, to medical malpractice. Enrique Carreras Melián died at the age of 19 after ten days in the intensive care unit of the Cimeq Hospital in the Cuban capital. The events date back to 2007, when the patient went with asthma to the Portuondo Polyclinic, in Marianao, in Havana, and there he had a complication and was presumed dead, when in fact he was alive. "After that he was in the Cimeq for 10 days. He was not dead," laments his mother.

Enrique Carreras Melián was born on November 4, 1988 and died on October 25, 2007. His mother's voice still breaks when she finds the strength to tell her story. It's been 17 years, but the pain is still there as if it happened yesterday. Once she has overcome her grief, she has found the strength to denounce that no one paid for her son's death. Quite the opposite. They went to trial, but the doctors who left him for dead at the polyclinic went on a mission. "They rewarded them to get them out of the way," says this mother, who lives in New Jersey, in the United States, a country where she ended up after taking part in medical missions in Brazil and Venezuela.

Zeriocha Melián assures that his son's case "made a lot of noise in Havana," but "justice was never done." "He died under iatrogenic action by the Cuban Government," he concludes.

The case of this mother is by no means an isolated event in a country where less and less is invested in public health. At the end of last year, the Cuban Social Audit Observatory accused the Gaesa Business Group of looting the Cuban health system for more than a decade. by appropriating almost 70 billion dollars from the salaries of health personnel assigned to missions abroad.

Although the regime promised that the money from the international brigades would be reinvested in the island's hospitals, the reality can no longer be hidden. Both at a hygienic level and in terms of equipment, facilities, furniture and resources, Cuban hospitals show obvious signs of disinvestment.

The Cuban National Office of Statistics and Information's own data show that in the last 13 years the regime invested more in hotels than in hospitals. In this way, between 2007 and 2018 the number of hospital centers decreased by 32% and in 2011 all rural health centers and 9% of polyclinics were closed.

Complaints about medical negligence are continuous on social networks. In February of last year, A father reported the death of his eight-month-old baby due to a "failed diagnosis".

The most famous case has been that of several doctors from Bayamo, sentenced to three years of house arrest for alleged negligence medical procedure that led to the death of a patient during a surgical procedure for which there were no available resources.

Also last year he reported medical negligence, the family of a young woman who suffered from dengue hemorrhagic fever and died after 20 days without a clear diagnosis in Cuba.