A Cuban doctor specializing in general comprehensive medicine and intensive and emergency medicine denounced in a TikTok video that the regime's immigration regulations prevent her from leaving Cuba, despite having waited three years to obtain her release from the healthcare system.
"I am trapped in this country, I am a Cuban doctor, I live in Cuba and this is one of the questions I am asked the most: why don't I leave this country with my family?" the doctor said in the video posted on Saturday.
The doctor explained that she abandoned her second specialization when she had just two months left to graduate, specifically to be able to emigrate. "I left it two months before becoming a specialist in order to emigrate, just like everyone else was doing in this country," she noted.
That decision, however, did not free her from the restrictions. The Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) classifies doctors who are in their final year of a specialty or who hold a second specialty as "regulated population," which prevents them from obtaining a passport or leaving the country without explicit permission from the ministry.
"The healthcare system regulates you when you are in your final year or have a secondary specialty, and that's what happened to me," the doctor explained.
After three years of requesting his release, on April 13, 2026, he finally received the corresponding notification, but the MINSAP did not lift the immigration regulation against him, he reported.
When trying to make a claim, he also received no response. "I started to complain, and to this day, due to issues with this government, nothing is known. It seems there was some confusion, but I still haven't received an answer," he said.
The case adds to a long series of similar situations documented in recent months. In April, another Cuban doctor was blocked again by MINSAP while trying to process her passport, also after three years of waiting to receive her release.
In June, Dr. Alberto Tejeda Ill published a letter titled "They Are Violating My Human Rights", in which he reported that the MINSAP is preventing him from obtaining a passport despite no longer having any employment ties with that ministry.
The legal basis for these restrictions is the Decree Law 306 from October 11, 2012, which establishes the "Vital Category" for health professionals deemed essential. Although the authorization process has a legal time frame of 50 days, in practice, it can extend up to five years or continue indefinitely without formal justification.
In June of last year, the regime quietly removed from its digital platform Soberanía the message that explained the reason for the travel restrictions on specialists, replacing it with a generic text that refers to MININT offices.
The new Immigration Law No. 171/2024, published in the Official Gazette on May 5, 2026, did not resolve the issue either: its Article 97 allows for the restriction of leaving the country to preserve the "qualified workforce," and authorization continues to depend on the discretion of officials.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a report this year that qualifies the Cuban Medical Missions program as forced labor, human trafficking, and modern slavery, involving the withholding of documents and the confiscation of between 70% and 90% of the salaries of doctors sent abroad.
"That's why I can't leave this country and that's why I'm still here," the doctor concluded in her video, which had garnered over 9,200 views at the time of its publication.
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