A group of defiant doctors in Cuba posted a rare video over the weekend criticizing the government’s handling of the pandemic, as COVID-19 patients continue suffering from a lack of medicines and essential supplies.
The video, featuring doctors from Holguin in eastern Cuba, came as the country’s health minister publicly acknowledged an oxygen shortage amid a surge of coronavirus cases.
“I want to denounce the collapse of our health system in our hospital and many others,” said Dr. Héctor Alejandro Santiesteban Fuentes, a second-year surgery resident at a hospital named for Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin. “It is not a lie. No one is paying us. It is the reality we are living today.”
Dr. Yuliet Consuegra Leyva, a third-year surgery resident at the same hospital in Holguin, said the health personnel were “mistreated, every day, by the upper echelons, the authorities. Actually, we are the ones sustaining this country.”
More than a dozen specialists, residents and interns from several hospitals in Holguin, including the head of intensive care at General Hospital Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Dr. Alejandro Eduardo Forés Arafet, appeared in the video.
The outspoken video is the latest example of how Cubans, including some working for the state, are becoming even more vocal after the anti-government protests that shook the island last month. It’s also more evidence that the COVID emergency is taking such dramatic undertones that health workers feel they need to speak out even at the risk of losing their jobs.
The doctors were particularly incensed by comments made by Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, who blamed health care workers for discontent surrounding the COVID-19 response. In an official meeting in Cienfuegos last week, Marrero said that the population was complaining more about “mistreatment” and “neglect” of patients by the health workers than the shortage of medicines.
“I publicly denounce that doctors are not to blame for the collapse of the health system in our country,” said each of the participants in the video. The comments echoed other doctors who replied to Marrero with anger on social media.
Rafael Alejandro Fuentes Sanchez, a general surgeon at one of the province’s main hospitals, acknowledged the group feared government retaliation for making the video.
“We are afraid, but we are not afraid of the pandemic; we are afraid of the government, of what it can do, and of the way it can react to the fact that we are speaking out to demand our rights and the rights of the people to have quality care,” said Fuentes Sanchez.
On Sunday, the government finally acknowledged a shortage of oxygen to treat COVID patients, as Cuban independent media and the Miami Herald reported.
The health minister, José Angel Portal Miranda, said there were “limitations with the medical oxygen coverage for patient care.” He said the shortage was due to a broken part in the island’s main oxygen-producing plant, a breakdown that “nobody expected.”
Hidden in a local newspaper Invasor’s July 29 report, there is a reference to the lack of oxygen in the central province of Ciego de Avila due to the broken plant in Havana. An official is quoted saying the situation was expected to last “until next month because the part that the Havana plant needs is imported from Germany, and it couldn’t arrive earlier.”
For weeks, Cubans have been sharing stories of COVID patients in desperate need of oxygen on social media. A woman from Moa, a town in Holguin, recorded a video showing five corpses wrapped in plastic bags and packing tape at a hospital morgue.
“In Moa, everyone is dying because of the lack of oxygen,” she cries in the video.
The lack of medical oxygen comes as the island is experiencing a COVID-19 surge, with one of the highest infection rates per person in the world. Authorities reported 9,169 cases and 65 deaths on Sunday, and more than 42,000 patients are getting medical treatment in hospitals. Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel recently admitted the public health system was overwhelmed.
The health minister said the government ordered plants belonging to the military and other state institutions to produce oxygen. The government received donations of small plants and is importing oxygen “in low levels” because the shortage is worldwide, he said. Portal Miranda announced the government created a working group to monitor the situation.
Diaz-Canel toured some of the military facilities Monday and tried to strike a conciliatory tone, tweeting his thanks to the health care workers “who are working full time in complex situations.”
The presidency’s website announced that a small plant donated by Russia arrived Sunday and started producing oxygen Monday. State television showed images on Sunday night of military helicopters flying oxygen tanks to Holguin.
After weeks of official silence about the shortage of oxygen, critics in Cuba questioned why the government did not have contingency plans to avoid depending on a sole oxygen plant during a pandemic. Others questioned how the government used the billions of dollars in revenue from exporting doctors abroad in “medical brigades.” For instance, a medical oxygen-producing plant sells for just $70,000 through Chinese online retailer Alibaba.
Critics also pointed out that the government has drastically cut the public health budget in recent years. In 2020, for example, it only made new investments for $80.4 million in public health and social assistance while funneling more than $4 billion to real estate, tourism and “business services,” according to official statistics.
“The lack of oxygen in hospitals (#Cuba is literally choking) could have been foreseen by the government. Experts gave advance notice of this health disaster. And it could have been solved if they had invested in oxygen plants instead of continuing building hotels,” said Cuban independent journalist Maykel Vivero.
In Holguin, where the doctors recorded the video, shortages of oxygen, medicines and even hospital beds are hitting harder those without connections or money to pay “por la izquierda,” a Cuban expression for bribes. Even as doctors and many health care workers are tirelessly working in dire conditions, corruption is also widespread in the public health system.
Roberto Montero, a Miami resident, said his family has to pay for antibiotics, oxygen, and even a hospital bed for his grandfather Sixto Fandiño, 91, who contracted COVID-19 in Velasco, a town in Holguin.
“In a country that is supposedly for the people, for the poor, if you don’t have money, you can’t have a stretcher or (the antibiotic) Rocephin or oxygen,” Montero said. Despite the family’s efforts, his grandfather passed away Aug. 7, and “what happened from then on was like a movie,” he said.
Montero said workers at the health center where his grandfather was admitted did not want to touch the body for fear of getting infected. After waiting for hours, “the workers just wrapped up the body with the same bedsheet and threw him in a nylon bag. My uncle has to pick him up and use his connections to speed up the burial.”
But just as his uncle was burying Montero’s grandfather, he learned that his autistic brother, Joel Fandiño, was in agony with COVID. Joel and Montero’s grandfather lived together and were cared for by a woman paid by the family in the U.S. They now suspect she might have brought the virus to their home.
Joel also died that day, found collapsed on the floor at his home.
“He was overweight, and there was no coffin for him nor how to bury him,” Montero said. “My uncle had to pay some carpenters to make a coffin and pay two people to go to the cemetery and dig a grave.”
A tractor lifted the coffin and dropped it on the grave.
“Even death is a struggle in Cuba,” Montero said. “Without money or connections, you can’t get anything.”
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