Related videos:
First-year medical students in Santiago de Cuba and Holguín joined the wave of protests initiated by their peers from Pinar del Río and Granma, demanding the elimination or restructuring of final exams due to the challenges posed by the electricity and logistics crisis currently affecting Cuba.
Both student communities submitted formal letters to their respective Boards of Directors, beginning with an urgent ethical call: "To expose the objective limitations that are currently compromising our academic performance."
The comprehensive final exams are scheduled from June 29 to July 3.
Students from the University of Medical Sciences of Santiago de Cuba argue that the data speaks for itself: "The vulnerability in preparation is not an abstract estimate. The widespread decline in scores on partial exams objectively demonstrates that the student body is not in a position to undertake a traditional comprehensive evaluation."
The letter also points out that the course has been delivered in a decentralized manner, which exacerbates the difficulties, and that power outages and a lack of transportation have drastically reduced both attendance and hours of independent study.
From Holguín, where the population has been getting barely three hours of electricity per day, the tone is even more emphatic: "There are no minimum conditions to take a final integrative exam with the traditional rigor. The interruptions in the power supply and the consequent lack of effective study time at home and in student residences make it unfair to assess our performance under the usual parameters."
Students at the "Mariana Grajales Coello" University of Medical Sciences also add a dimension of fairness that the government has not addressed: "It's not fair that the first year is the only one with final exams when we are all going through the same situation."
Both groups formally request two alternatives: that the exams already completed be considered as the final grade, or that the syllabus be reduced to the topics that could be consolidated in the classroom.
The protest has sparked a polarized debate on social media, with criticism directed at the students, who quickly responded. A medical student fired back with a direct message: "Do a shift without electricity and without supplies, and then we’ll talk."
That same young man rejected comparisons with previous generations and was emphatic about the origin of the problem: "It's not the difficulty of the tests, it's the lack of resources and the situation of the country."
She described a daily reality of blackouts that leave ETECSA coverage unavailable from nine at night, students with visual impairments who cannot use candlelight, a lack of proper breakfast, and the absence of sphygmomanometers for third-year students.
Her conclusion summarizes the feelings of a generation: "They call us the glass generation when instead of living, we are just surviving."
The student demand reveals a contradiction that the regime has been unable to explain: in May, the Ministry of Higher Education suspended the university entrance examinations for the 2026-2027 academic year, implicitly acknowledging that the electrical crisis makes fair assessment impossible. However, this same reasoning has not been applied to those who are already enrolled in their programs.
In that same month, sixth-year medical students in Santiago de Cuba saw their hospital rotations suspended to fulfill mandatory military training as part of the so-called "Year of Preparation for Defense," yet another interference by the regime in the medical education that the students themselves have reported.
The electrical crisis underlying this entire situation recorded in June a generation deficit of between 2,040 and 2,215 MW during peak hours, with some areas of the country exceeding 72 consecutive hours without electricity.
The regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel has failed to reverse the situation, which now threatens to leave an Island already facing the collapse of its healthcare system without well-trained doctors.
Filed under: