The Provincial Blood Bank of Villa Clara issued a statement this Sunday to refute the image of scarcity circulating on Cuban social media, asserting that the province has a guaranteed supply of blood for its emergency services. The statement, released by the state agency ACN, implicitly acknowledges the phenomenon it seeks to deny.
The director of the entity, Dr. Idamis Fernández Jure, stated that "despite the emergence of requests for donors on social media, the province has managed to control the demand for this vital liquid to respond immediately to those who arrive at the emergency services."
According to the official statement, the bank monitors the inventories of all hospitals in the area daily to verify the availability and expiration dates of blood components. "We check whether the blood present in health institutions is expired or not, as it also has an expiration period, which poses a significant risk to the patient if not detected," emphasized Fernández Jure.
The deputy director María Elena Infante Pacho added that the province has extraction centers in all 13 municipalities, which prevents donors from having to travel to Santa Clara.
When a patient's family cannot donate, the bank turns to community mechanisms: the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the family doctor, or workplaces serve as channels to mobilize donors.
The institution also produces plasma for medications such as albumin and gamma globulins, and has cooperated with other provinces in emergency situations, such as following the explosion of the Saratoga hotel and the fire at the Supertankers Base in Matanzas in 2022.
The official statement contrasts with a documented pattern on a national scale. Voluntary blood donations in Cuba decreased by 29% between 2020 and 2023, falling from 357,665 to 254,845 annually according to the National Office of Statistics and Information. The massive exodus of young people — the main donor group — is one of the identified factors.
In provinces like Sancti Spíritus, the situation reached extremes: in April 2025, the provincial bank recorded zero available voluntary donations, and transfusions at the Camilo Cienfuegos Provincial General Hospital depended entirely on blood provided by family members. That same year, an informal blood market emerged on social media, with offers of up to 6,000 pesos for an O negative donation.
The phenomenon of requests on social media that the director from Villa Clara mentions in passing has specific faces. In July of this year, the family of Ramona Gutiérrez Pita, an 80-year-old woman from Ciego de Ávila with a hip fracture, had to turn to Facebook to find three A+ blood donors because the system could not provide them. "She fell, has a hip fracture, and is weak while waiting to be operated on; without A+ blood donations, they can't take her to the operating room," wrote Guillermo Rodríguez Sánchez, a family member of the patient, on Facebook.
This contradiction is compounded by another, even more significant one: in April 2025, the regime officially acknowledged that BioCubaFarma will export blood plasma to the international market through Laboratorios AICA, even having a signed agreement with Brazil, while Cuban donors receive only a small snack and a soft drink as compensation.
According to data from the Pan American Health Organization, Cuba recorded a rate of 23 donations per 1,000 inhabitants in 2023, compared to 31 in 2020.
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