Irisleydi Trista Calzadilla, a Cuban woman suffering from a 20-centimeter malignant tumor in her spine, made a desperate plea on social media yesterday asking for help to obtain a humanitarian visa that would allow her to leave Cuba and receive medical treatment abroad.
Irisleydi suffers from a retroperitoneal mesenchymal chondrosarcoma, an extremely rare and aggressive subtype of soft tissue sarcoma, located behind the ovaries and infiltrating the spine between the L4 and L5 vertebrae.
"It's a tumor I have retroperitoneal, behind the ovaries, infiltrating the spine between L5 and L4, large in size measuring 20 cm. The first biopsy indicates that it is a mesenchymal chondrosarcoma," she wrote in her Facebook post.
They have undergone chemotherapy, radiation, and surgeries without success in reducing the tumor mass. Cuban doctors informed them that the only option available on the island is amputation, a procedure that would not guarantee an improved quality of life either.
"The only thing they can do here is amputate, and that operation won't give me a quality of life either," he recounted. However, the specialists themselves told him that "in another country there are resources and the possibility to operate and remove it."
The physical deterioration he describes is severe. Without dexamethasone—a corticosteroid he has been taking for about a year—he cannot walk. “If I don’t take dexamethasone, I can’t walk; my feet don’t respond. And when you go to the hospital and there’s nothing else they can do, there’s nothing else to do, only dexamethasone,” he said in a video that is circulating on social media.
The medication, however, causes him swelling and fluid retention, and he can no longer continue taking it. "You can only take it for five days at most, and I have been taking it for a year, so I can't keep taking that pill either," he warned.
The driving force behind her fight is her 13-year-old son. "I have a 13-year-old boy, and he's all I think about because he really needs me; he is my life, my whole life," she expressed with a choked voice in the video.
Irisleydi mentioned that she has a pending immigration claim as the spouse of an American citizen, which is also stalled, and that her doctor prepared a written immigration document containing her entire medical history and diagnosis. "I have all the evidence to demonstrate the severity of my illness; so far, I have no metastasis in any other organ, just that mass that is difficult to remove," she clarified.
Your case is part of the structural crisis of the Cuban oncology system, documented since 2022 by the Cuban Medical Guild, which includes severe shortages of chemotherapy drugs, lack of radiotherapy equipment, and a collapse of diagnostic supplies. In 2025, the government implicitly acknowledged the crisis by announcing the acquisition of equipment to produce cytostatics, but the deficiencies persist.
Mesenchymal chondrosarcoma requires highly complex oncological surgery in specialized centers, with a major complication rate of around 30%, an intervention that is beyond the reach of the Cuban health system in its current state.
This is not the first case of this kind. Other Cubans with serious illnesses have applied for humanitarian visas from U.S. immigration authorities with mixed results: some approved and others denied due to insufficient evidence. In November 2025, the U.S. denied a humanitarian visa to a Cuban girl with cancer, while in April 2026 another Cuban with stage three cancer received help to start treatment.
"That they help me so I can really get out of here and reach a hospital where they can actually operate on me or provide me with treatment that can combat this, that can take it away," Irisleydi requested.
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