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Rachel Núñez Álvarez, a 10-year-old girl from Las Tunas, is currently hospitalized at the William Soler University Pediatric Hospital in Havana due to severe liver failure, while her family faces a precarious financial situation and seeks solidarity from support groups in the capital and the Cuban community abroad.
The activist Yanalli González posted a call for help on Facebook after speaking directly with the girl's mother. "I just spoke with her mom, and she told me that tests are being done, and on Tuesday, a test will be conducted to measure liver damage," González wrote.
According to the publication, Rachel's mother cannot stay with her daughter due to the strict hospital regulations. "She is far away, staying in Santiago de las Vegas at a church where she was taken in; the girl is at William Soler with her grandmother," the activist explained.
González made a direct appeal: "I urge support groups in Havana," and provided the family's contact numbers for those wishing to help: the girl's aunt can be reached at +53 5 4096366, and the mother's WhatsApp number is 56096626.
The case of Rachel adds to a series of similar situations that have shaken Cuba in recent weeks. On May 30, the mother of another 10-year-old girl with liver failure made a desperate plea from the pediatric hospital in Las Tunas, where her daughter had been hospitalized for 23 days and five days in intensive care.
In that case, the center did not have the necessary reagent to perform prothrombin time and INR tests, which are essential for assessing liver clotting function.
The most recent and heartbreaking outcome of this crisis was that of the baby Raibel David Gómez Santana, who was 10 months old and originally from Sancti Spíritus. He passed away on June 5 without receiving the liver transplant he needed.
His father, Raudelvis Gómez Carabeo, had summed up the situation with a phrase that captures the reality of the Cuban healthcare system: "It cannot be done" — referring to transplantation in Cuba.
The William Soler Hospital has a unit for Hepatology, Hepatobiliary Surgery, and Liver Transplantation, and it is the national referral center for these procedures in pediatric patients.
However, multiple families have reported since 2023 that the transplant is not effectively available in practice, forcing parents to seek solutions abroad through humanitarian visas and fundraising campaigns.
Cuban studies indicate a lethality of 36.8% in cases of acute hepatic failure in children, with worse outcomes when the prothrombin time exceeds 20 seconds, highlighting the urgency of timely diagnosis and treatment.
The most well-known case with a positive outcome is that of Amanda Lemus Ortiz, a Cuban girl with biliary atresia who was successfully transplanted at the La Paz University Hospital in Madrid in March 2024, after months of efforts, a humanitarian visa, and a massive solidarity campaign. Rachel's case, for now, awaits the results of the scheduled tests to determine the extent of the liver damage and outline the next steps.
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