Cuban doctor Katerin Hernández shared a testimony this week on Facebook that encapsulates in a few words what millions of Cubans have silently experienced: the contrast with a hospital in another country allowed her to grasp the precariousness of the healthcare system in Cuba.
"Walking through the halls of a hospital in a capitalist country, I realized how much communism took from me: it didn't just strip me of my role as a patient but also as a doctor," wrote Hernández, accompanying his post with a photograph of a modern, clean, and well-lit hospital corridor.
The doctor regrets having invested six years of her career not in learning, but in surviving. "How I wish I could have dedicated my six years of studying medicine to learning instead of trying to survive," she stated.
In just a moment, that clean hallway brought back images that should never have existed in a healthcare system. "In just a minute, I recalled repugnant images: mice in the eaves, clogged and filthy bathrooms, rotten food, worn and stained clothing; memories that should never have been part of a healthcare system," he described.
Hernández directly rejects the argument that the Cuban regime repeatedly uses to justify the healthcare collapse. "The communists will say: 'The blockade took all of that away from you.' Lies! It was the Castro, their dictatorship, Fidel and his failed communism, their henchmen, and the deep class inequality in a country where they proclaimed that 'everything is for everyone,'" he wrote.
Her testimony is not an isolated case. A Cuban woman in Spain compared a public hospital to 5-star hotels in terms of management and professionalism. A young man in Peru exclaimed how we were misled after his first experience at a Peruvian medical center. A doctor in Uruguay recounted that she had to study pediatrics from scratch due to the lack of real experience resulting from her training in Cuba.
The reality described in this testimony is backed by devastating accounts. The physical conditions of Cuban hospitals have been systematically reported: the Calixto García Hospital suffered a partial roof collapse in November 2025; the Orlando Pantoja Tamayo General Hospital was criticized in December of that year for collapsed bathrooms and lack of medications; and the Juan Bruno Zayas Clinical Surgical Hospital reported sewage under patients' beds in January 2026.
The regime itself has acknowledged the health collapse, although it continues to attribute it to the U.S. embargo, an argument that emigrated doctors and analysts reject, highlighting internal structural causes that have accumulated over decades of dictatorship.
Hernández closed his publication with a phrase that summarizes the experience of those who have been able to compare: "How good it feels to enter a hospital knowing you will come out alive, something that many cannot say about Cuban hospitals."
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