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The seventh anniversary of the abduction of Cuban doctors Landy Rodríguez Hernández and Assel Herrera Correa passed on April 12 without a single official mention from the Cuban government, consolidating a pattern of gradual silence that the independent medium Diario de Cuba documented with testimonies from people close to the families of the missing doctors.
Both doctors were kidnapped on April 12, 2019, in Mandera, northeastern Kenya, while traveling in a convoy with armed escort from their residences to the Mandera Referral Hospital.
The attack was attributed to the jihadist group Al-Shabaab and cost the life of a Kenyan police officer. Mandera was classified as a high-risk area due to its proximity to Somalia, with documented histories of attacks against foreign personnel.
In February 2024, Al-Shabaab released a statement via Telegram claiming that both doctors had died in a bombing by the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Jilib, Somalia.
The version was never independently verified: AFRICOM concluded in June 2024 that it "did not cause civilian casualties" in that operation.
The seventh anniversary of the kidnapping came and went without any Cuban authority mentioning it publicly. That familiar silence is not a coincidence.
Diario de Cuba obtained testimonies from individuals close to the families of the doctors, who explained that the fear of reprisals weighs more heavily than any need for visibility.
Among the concerns mentioned are the potential withdrawal of state support, travel restrictions, and the loss of any channel —however tenuous— to obtain information about their relatives. The families have not given interviews or launched public campaigns to demand answers.
The Cuban government acknowledged in 2024 that it had "no information or evidence to confirm whether the doctors are alive or dead" and pledged to investigate.
Two years after that promise, there is no official confirmation of the doctors' deaths nor any public evidence of conclusive efforts to clarify the events or recover possible remains.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez stated in April 2025 that "efforts to clarify the situation continue," without providing any concrete advancements.
Seven years after the kidnapping, the case of Rodríguez and Herrera illustrates the convergence of three dynamics that the regime prefers not to discuss: the exposure of cooperators to high-risk environments without public security assessments, the contractual opacity governing their deployment, and the political manipulation of information when there are failures in Cuban medical missions.
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