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An 80-year-old woman named Ramona Gutiérrez Pita has been hospitalized at the Provincial Hospital of Ciego de Ávila for several days, awaiting a hip surgery that cannot be performed because her family has not been able to find blood donors that the Cuban healthcare system cannot provide.
According to what the activist and writer Guillermo Rodríguez Sánchez explained on Facebook, Ramona suffered a fall in her community of Colorado, a rural locality in the municipality of Baraguá, and the resulting fracture left her weak and incapacitated.
"She fell, suffered a hip fracture, and is weak while awaiting surgery; without A+ blood donations, they can't take her to the operating room," wrote Rodríguez Sánchez.
The patient needs three donations. She is in the Angiology Room, bed 16, of the provincial hospital in Avilés.
Those who can donate can contact Arazay, Ramona's daughter, at the phone number 50745435.
The case is not the first of its kind in the same province. In March, another elderly woman from Ciego de Ávila also needed blood donors for a hip surgery, and her neighbors were unable to donate because they had suffered from chikungunya.
The pattern repeats with a regularity that exposes the collapse of the Cuban healthcare system: families turning to social media because blood banks have no reserves and the State does not guarantee the most basic necessities.
Voluntary blood donations in Cuba decreased by 29% nationwide between 2020 and 2023, dropping from 357,665 to 254,845 annually.
Meanwhile, the Cuban regime officially admitted in April 2025 that BioCubaFarma will export blood plasma from Cuban donors to the international market through Laboratorios AICA, even signing an agreement with Brazil.
Cuban donors receive only a small snack and a soft drink as compensation, while the State makes millions from the sale of blood derivatives abroad.
This contradiction—exporting plasma while patients like Ramona wait in hospital beds for some stranger to donate blood on Facebook—summarizes the institutional neglect faced by the most vulnerable Cubans.
The Provincial Hospital of Ciego de Ávila, where Ramona is hospitalized, also has a long list of complaints: in October 2025, oncology patients were sent home without chemotherapy due to a lack of supplies; in September of that same year, a recently operated patient was trapped in the hospital elevator.
Hip fractures in individuals over 80 years old are an emergency that requires urgent surgical intervention to reduce the risk of serious complications, including anemia, bronchopneumonia, and death.
Every day that Ramona remains in that bed without being able to undergo surgery is a day that the Cuban regime owes her and her desperate family an answer.
"Let's help this lady and her desperate family by sharing the situation they are going through until they find donors," requested Rodríguez Sánchez in his post.
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