A young Cuban identified as @laurenlotti posted on April 4 a video on TikTok that starkly summarizes the pharmaceutical crisis the island is experiencing: her grandmother, who suffers from panic attacks, spent the night in distress because the family could not obtain medication and was unable to find it in any state pharmacy.
"My grandmother suffers from panic attacks. When she's off her medication, they hit her very hard. Last night she was unwell all night long," the young woman recounted in the 52-second video.
The solution came from where it usually does in Cuba: from a neighbor. A woman from the neighborhood gave the family a pill that she gives to her own daughter. After taking it, the grandmother calmed down and was able to sleep.
"The most beautiful thing we have as Cubans is that we help each other," said @laurenlotti, in a phrase that encapsulates decades of collective survival in the face of state abandonment.
The family has been unable to buy medicine at the state pharmacy for a long time. "For a long time now, we have had to buy medications on the street at very high prices because there are no medicines at the pharmacy," the young woman explained. That night, the grandfather was preparing lunch while the grandmother was going through a crisis.
The case is no exception. Nationwide, there are 461 of the 651 essential medications missing from the Basic Medication List, which means that only 30% of essential drugs are available in Cuban pharmacies. In Villa Clara, provincial authorities acknowledged on February 27 that 368 of the 636 medications on the basic list are missing, affecting, in their own words, "all pharmacological families."
The informal market has become the only real channel for accessing pharmaceuticals for millions of Cubans. Vendors operate openly in locations in Havana such as the bridge at 100 and Boyeros, and on Telegram channels where medications are offered like common goods, as acknowledged by the official newspaper Trabajadores in March 2026.
The regime's response has been to persecute those who fill the void it itself creates. The government has conducted more than 5,000 joint operations of the Ministry of Health with MININT against informal vendors, eliminating the only alternative distribution channels available.
Ulises Toirac defended those vendors on April 6, arguing on Facebook that without them, no one would have access to medications. Days earlier, on April 5, the activist José Daniel Ferrer made an urgent call to obtain the antibiotic Aztreonam for a baby under two months old in critical condition in a hospital in Bayamo.
The crisis has measurable and devastating consequences. The infant mortality rate closed 2025 at 9.9 per thousand live births, nearly triple the 3.9 recorded in 2018. In March 2026, the Director-General of the World Health Organization described the health situation in Cuba as "deeply concerning."
"This situation is experienced by many people in Cuba. The lack of medicines at the pharmacy and the very high prices on the street," concluded @laurenlotti in her video. "My beautiful people, each person who follows me is telling the world that Cuba exists, that we deserve to be better off."
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