The Cuban doctor Glen Ronald Tamayo Valdéz, currently residing in Holguín, reported that he is now working as a cashier in a private company after being sidelined from the healthcare field, which he expresses a desire to continue pursuing.
"I was given a choice: 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 he would receive within the healthcare system.
Tamayo stated that he would have to travel daily to a municipality located tens of kilometers from his home, despite the fact that, as he pointed out, there is a hospital with a shortage of specialists about 500 meters from his house.
The distance, he explained, makes commuting an expense that is impossible to cover with his salary. “Why do I have to spend 5,000 pesos on daily transportation if I only earn 10,000 in a month?,” he questioned.
"Is there something more that needs to be done in order to work in health?" he added.
Tamayo insisted that he is still willing to return. "I haven't left anything behind. I accepted their regulations. I want to work in healthcare. Tomorrow, if they call me. But I need to eat, I want to feel, I want to get home and tell my family about the good I did for someone, how useful I was," he stated.
The doctor also described how he experiences the shift from healthcare work to a private company. "I will continue as a cashier, imagining that I am on duty, 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 nobody can take away from me," he concluded.
Tamayo's testimony comes just two months after Cuba once again modified salaries in the healthcare sector.
Resolution 17/2026 established a new salary scale for doctors and other health workers, effective from July and 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 recently graduated doctor and 8,880 CUP for a second-degree specialist, before adding additional payments for on-call shifts, night shifts, seniority, or other conditions.
However, testimonies from professionals who claim they cannot support themselves with those earnings have continued to emerge.
In May, the specialist in Comprehensive General Medicine Liliana Isabel Salazar Villariño explained that she had stopped practicing because her income was not enough to support her child.
According to what he said then, even by working more than five shifts a month, his salary did not reach 10,000 pesos.
Months earlier, another doctor had indicated that she needed 13,050 pesos for a basic grocery purchase that didn't even meet 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 reiterated the figures on the problem by stating that his base salary was not enough to simultaneously buy a package of chicken, oil, and a carton of eggs.
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