A young Cuban identified on TikTok as @locuras_con_yendry reported the response he received at a clinic on the island when he took his girlfriend, who was suffering from the flu and severe cough, to the emergency room at ten o'clock at night: the doctor on duty told him that they could do nothing and that they should return home.
According to the young man in his video, his girlfriend had been suffering from a cold, cough, and shortness of breath for three or four days, and he decided to seek medical attention because she could no longer bear it.
Upon arriving at the clinic and explaining the situation to the on-duty doctor, the response was blunt: "Well, there is no aerosol here, so you're going to have to go home because we can't do anything."
The young man did not accept the refusal and insisted that they at least examine his girlfriend. "At least examine her. What if she has pneumonia? If she has pneumonia and something happens to her, it will be your problem," he warned.
After much insistence, the medical staff agreed to examine her, but the outcome was equally frustrating: they sent her home with the sole recommendation to drink plenty of fluids, without prescribing any antibiotics or specific treatment.
"The liquid is not medicine; they should have prescribed a treatment. Antibiotic? I don’t know, something to get rid of that flu," the young man complained in his video, visibly upset.
The testimony closes with an irony that increasingly resonates among Cubans: "They don't say that Cuba is a medical power. I don't know where we stand, I don't understand."
The collapse of the Cuban healthcare system
The incident reported by this young man adds to other signs of the deteriorating healthcare situation in Cuba. The Cuban healthcare system is going through one of the most critical moments documented in its history: 461 out of 651 essential drugs are missing from the Basic Drugs List, meaning that only 30% of essential medications are available in state pharmacies.
The Public Health Minister, José Ángel Portal Miranda, admitted last July that only between 30% and 32% of the essential medications were available in the country.
Among the scarce medications is salbutamol, an essential bronchodilator for patients with respiratory diseases, which has been unavailable in Cuban pharmacies for months.
The consequences of this collapse are measurable and severe. The infant mortality rate closed 2025 at 9.9 per thousand live births, nearly three times the 3.9 recorded in 2018.
In April 2026, a one-and-a-half-month-old baby passed away at the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes hospital in Bayamo due to a lack of the antibiotic Aztreonam, a case that sparked outrage on social media.
In March 2026, the director general of the World Health Organization described the health situation in Cuba as "deeply concerning."
In the absence of support from the State, many Cubans turn to the informal market to obtain medications, though at prices that are unaffordable for most. The regime has responded with over 5,000 joint operations by the Ministry of Health and MININT against informal sellers, eliminating the only alternative channels that millions of people have to access drugs.
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