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A resident of Cárdenas has been waiting for more than 14 months for the legalization of academic documents that she contracted in April 2025, in a case that highlights the bureaucratic collapse of the Cuban system for document legalization in Matanzas.
Mairolys Hernández Morales, from the 13 de Marzo neighborhood in the municipality of Cárdenas, signed a contract on April 14, 2025, before lawyer Yanetsy Cortina Graham, from the local collective law office, to legalize documents in the name of Yaimaralys Aldazábal Ulacia, reported on Friday the citizen complaints section Apartado 1433 of the official newspaper Girón.
The procedures include the certification of grades and the thematic plan of the Bachelor's degree in Psychology at the University of Medical Sciences of Matanzas (UCMM), as well as the legalization of the diploma with the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) and the Ministry of Justice (Minjus).
Since then, the lawyer's response has always been the same: "We have to wait... these processes take time... we have contracts that take up to two years, etc., etc.," the affected party stated in a letter to the press.
Fed up with the situation, Hernández posed a direct question: "How is it possible that there isn't a single person offering something convincing? There can be no justification for such mistreatment, as paying a high amount for this service shows sacrifice."
Girón's analysis reveals where the delinquency is concentrated, as the contracts were signed on April 14, 2025, but the documents did not reach the Minsap until March 12, 2026, almost 11 months later.
During that period, the UCMM took approximately four months to issue the documents, and subsequently, they remained stagnated for another four months in the General Directorate of Specialized Offices before being submitted to Minsap.
At the close of this note, the three contracts remain pending completion with the Minjus.
Sergio Jorge Pagés Valdés, provincial director of the Collective Law Firms of Matanzas, responded to the case by describing the procedures as "complex and inter-institutional in nature, involving the UCMM, the Ministry of Public Health, and the Ministry of Justice, as well as management structures of the Specialized Law Firm, which entails several administrative phases of application, verification, issuance, and legalization, with timelines that do not solely depend on the acting law firm."
The official also stated that "we are systematically monitoring these files and will accompany the sender until the conclusion."
Girón was emphatic in highlighting that "in the face of the avalanche of requests of this nature, it is the duty of the committed institutions to find solutions, alternatives that expedite the process, but never to delay it, because every client pays, and very well, for decent service."
Meanwhile, Hernández continues to wait and summarizes the feelings of thousands of Cubans with an unanswered question: "How much longer will there be such poor work, indifference, disrespect, and irresponsibility?"
In theory, the legalization of academic documents should be completed within 45 business days from the receipt of the request at the university, a deadline that is rarely adhered to in practice.
The volume of applications has surged due to mass emigration. In 2024, more than 1,500,000 documents were legalized in Cuba, compared to 442,564 in 2022, which has overwhelmed a system with limited daily quotas ranging from 50 to 100 documents per office, further exacerbated by power outages that force manual processing of procedures.
Since February 2025, the Ministry of Justice has taken over the legalization functions that previously belonged to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but the institutional change has not resolved the bottlenecks.
The current fees set by Resolution 486/2025 also establish a difference of up to 25 times between what a resident pays and what a Cuban abroad pays, a scheme that the organization Cubalex described in January as "economic apartheid" and "legalization of inequality."
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