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A Cuban mother shared publicly the anguish she experienced after losing her newborn daughter at the Hospital Materno de Camagüey, in a testimony broadcast by journalist José Luis Tan Estrada on his Facebook profile.
According to her account, during the prenatal check-ups, the doctors assured her that she was expecting a macrosomic baby, with a weight that was appropriate or even above average.
The reality at the time of delivery was radically different: her daughter entered the world weighing just two pounds.
The mother describes a sequence of contradictions that she cannot understand. A cesarean section was performed due to a supposed retroplacental hematoma, but without a prior ultrasound to confirm that diagnosis.
What disturbs her the most is that the day before the procedure, she had an ultrasound, and everything seemed to be fine.
The suffering did not stop upon leaving the operating room. Newly operated on, with the physical and emotional pain of a cesarean section, she had to go up and down stairs every two or three hours to try to find out how her daughter was doing.
The hospital does not have an elevator, and there was no staff assigned to keep the mothers informed about the status of their babies.
As she climbed those stairs, the little girl was fighting a battle for survival.
During four days, the girl faced extremely serious complications: pulmonary, stomach, and cerebral hemorrhages, several cardiac arrests, kidney damage, and multiple seizures. In the end, she did not make it.
"My daughter fought for her life for four days," the mother summarized in her testimony.
This case is not the first to shake the Camagüey Maternal Hospital.
In May 2026, public complaints indicated that more than 15 babies had died at that facility between January and May of that year, amidst deplorable hygienic and sanitary conditions that included sewage leaks in the neonatal room.
In September 2024, another family reported the death of a baby at the same hospital due to alleged medical negligence, and similar cases were recorded in August and September 2025.
The situation worsens when considering the national context. Cuba ended 2025 with a child mortality rate of 9.9 per 1,000 live births, the highest in decades, compared to 7.1 in 2024 and 4.0 in 2018, representing a cumulative increase of 148%.
Maternal mortality also climbed to 44.1 per 100,000 live births in 2025, up from 40.6 the previous year.
Estrada was decisive in concluding her post: "No mother should leave the hospital empty-handed. No family should be left without answers. And no tragedy of this magnitude should be ignored."
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