The Cuban doctor Glen Ronald Tamayo Valdéz, a resident of Holguín, recounted that he is currently working as a cashier in a private company after being removed from his healthcare role, which he asserts he wishes to continue practicing.
"They made me choose: between traveling and living, between being a doctor and eating", Tamayo wrote in , where he explained the reasons that led him to seek another source of income.
The professional shared that some people are surprised when they find him behind a cash register and ask if he has definitively left medicine. His response is clear: "I haven't left anything."
According to his testimony, one of the main obstacles is the job placement that he would be assigned within the health system.
Tamayo stated that he would have to travel daily to a municipality located dozens of kilometers from his home, despite the fact that, as he pointed out, there is a hospital with a shortage of specialists just about 500 meters from his house.
The distance, he explained, turns transportation into an expense that is impossible to bear with his salary. «Why do I have to spend 5,000 pesos daily on transportation, if I only earn 10,000 in a month?», he asked.
"Is there something else we need to work on in order to work in Health?" he added.
Tamayo insisted that he remains willing to return. «I want to work in Health. Tomorrow, if they call me. But I have to eat», he affirmed.
The doctor also referred to the frustration it causes him to have exchanged the hospital for a private company.
"I will continue as a cashier, imagining that I am in a guard's body, signing out of habit when I stamp the company's seal and treating everyone who comes to me with kindness," he wrote.
"Missing what I was, what I am, and what I will always be. Because that no one can take away from me," he concluded.
Tamayo's testimony comes just two months after Cuba once again adjusted salaries in the healthcare sector.
Resolution 17/2026 established a new salary scale for doctors and other healthcare workers, effective from July, with payments starting in August.
The new fixed scale, for example, a base salary of 7,045 CUP per month for a non-specialized or newly graduated doctor and 8,880 CUP for a second-degree specialist, before adding additional payments for shifts, night work, seniority, or other conditions.
However, testimonies from professionals claiming they cannot make ends meet with those earnings have continued to emerge throughout 2026.
In May, the specialist in Comprehensive General Medicine Liliana Isabel Salazar Villariño explained that she had stopped working because her income was insufficient to support her child.
He then recounted that even by doing more than five shifts a month, his salary did not reach 10,000 pesos.
Months earlier, another doctor had revealed that she needed 13,050 pesos for a basic grocery purchase that did not even cover all her monthly needs and acknowledged that she also worked in the private sector to supplement her income.
In August, the specialist doctor Daniel Del Toro González from the Pediatric Hospital of Las Tunas, again quantified the issue, pointing out that his base salary was insufficient to simultaneously buy a pack of chicken, oil, and a dozen eggs.
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