Under the Houston sun, in the middle of the afternoon, the Cuban Alexander Jesús Figueredo Izaguirre was on a scaffold with a sweaty helmet and his hands full of dust when a coworker cut his hand on a sheet.
What happened next was captured in a post on : the man who came down to treat the wound, clean it, and close it was neither a paramedic nor a first responder. He was a physician with over 15 years of clinical experience who was working in construction because he was still unable to practice his profession in the United States.
When the foreman asked him where he had learned to treat those wounds, Figueredo answered without hesitation: "In Cuba, I was a doctor." After a pause, the foreman's next question was, "And what is a doctor doing on a scaffold?" To which he proudly replied, "This, my friend. Living. Starting. Because those who know how to work are not afraid of any job."
The doctor emphasized that working in construction does not embarrass him.
"These hands have stitched up patients in a hospital and have built walls in Houston, and both times I did it with the same dignity. Many people know the doctor in the coat. Few know the man who climbed the scaffolding without complaining, because rent doesn't understand pride," he wrote.
And he sent a message to compatriots in the same situation: "If you are starting from scratch in a job that is not yours, listen to me: that doesn't take away who you are. It proves it to you," he wrote.
Figueredo is a specialist in Comprehensive General Medicine and a former resident in Urology; he worked at the 13 de Marzo Polyclinic in Bayamo. In April 2021, Cuban health authorities expelled him from the health sector for five years after he published complaints on social media about the shortage of medications and supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The regime accused him of damaging the reputation of the health system; he asserted from the beginning that the punishment was political.
In July 2022, he arrived in the United States along with his colleague Alexander Pupo Casas, after crossing through Central America and Mexico. Since then, he has been living in Houston, where he works in various jobs while preparing for the USMLE exams and the ECFMG certification to validate his degree, a process that can take up to five years and cost about $30,000.
This reality affects thousands of Cuban professionals in exile. According to a report by Telemundo 51 from last May, more than 300 Cuban doctors were trapped in a migratory limbo that prevented them from working or practicing, within a network of approximately 1,500 foreign doctors who arrived in the previous five years. At least 27 had passed all the revalidation exams but were still unable to join hospitals due to issues with their immigration status.
The publication of the scaffolding comes just two days after Figueredo sent an open letter to Donald Trump and Marco Rubio requesting that the ASPIRE program — funded with 61.5 million dollars for Caribbean countries to hire doctors directly — includes the exiled Cuban professionals who already live in the United States. "The doctors are already here. We just need to be allowed to be doctors," he wrote in his letter.
In June 2024, Figueredo had already purchased his first Mercedes-Benz in the United States, less than two years after arriving in the country, a sign that the journey—though challenging—is progressing.
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