The ordeal of obtaining medicines in Cuba
While awaiting an esophageal transplant for her four-year-old son, Cuban Jessica Rodríguez faces a daily battle to obtain medicine and medical supplies in a country where more than 70% of basic medicines are in short supply.
"I get desperate all the time just thinking about not having something I might need," says Rodríguez, 27, from her home in Santa Fé, a neighborhood in western Havana. Beside her, little Luis Ángelo watches a cartoon on his cell phone.
She speaks calmly, though distressed: the child survives with a tracheostomy and is fed through the stomach. In addition to being asthmatic and allergic, he has mild heart disease and suffers from epileptic seizures.
In a country under an increasingly stringent US embargo and mired in its worst economic crisis in more than three decades, it is very difficult to secure the seven medications it needs every day, as well as essential cannulas and tubes.
"I know that the lack of medicines, the lack of suction catheters, and a cannula that cannot be replaced affect the child's health and can lead to serious illnesses that can even cost their life," explains Rodríguez.
Like this mother, many Cubans face difficulties obtaining medication.
“More than 70% of the list of basic medicines has been affected,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel said recently in a television interview.
In recent years, the country has been unable to secure the $300 million (R$1.63 billion) needed to import raw materials to produce most of the 650 medicines that made up its basic list in 2024, the president said.
On the island of 9.7 million people, pharmacy shelves are empty and hospitals lack supplies such as gauze, sutures, disinfectant and oxygen.
"There are days when there is nothing, and other days something appears," a doctor who works at a hospital in the capital told AFP, on condition of anonymity.
People with chronic illnesses have a document known as a “tarjetón,” which allows them to purchase prescription or long-term medications at subsidized prices.
Luis Ángelo has his own, but "sometimes months go by and there's no medicine," warns Rodríguez. His mother is often forced to buy it on the black market at exorbitant prices.
"The price is cruel, and not having the money to buy them is also cruel," he says of the approximately 400 pesos (21 reais) per pack of pills. A high price for a country where the average monthly salary is 6,500 pesos, equivalent to 54 dollars at the official exchange rate (294 reais) and 17 dollars (92 reais) on the informal market.
In Cuba, where the healthcare system is public and universal for Cubans, private pharmacies and healthcare services are not legal.
Faced with alarming shortages of medicines, since 2021 the communist government has allowed the population to transport food and medicines from abroad duty-free in their luggage, although not for commercial purposes.
Many medications that enter the country through this route feed an informal market that profits from the pain of others and operates through WhatsApp groups and websites.
However, groups that offer donations or promote the exchange of medicines for food also operate on social media.
In one of them, identified as "Cambias o donas medicamentos," Sophi desperately searches for dorzolamine to treat ocular hypertension. "I need it for my 86-year-old grandmother," she writes.
Likewise, projects like Palomas have emerged, a communication and solidarity platform that, since its creation in Havana in 2021, has already provided completely free medicines to more than 179,000 Cubans.
Palomas relies on medications people have at home, “leftovers from some treatment or something someone brought from abroad,” explains its coordinator, Sergio Cabrera.
In its 13 WhatsApp groups, the project publishes a daily list of available medications and another list of those needed. Any Cuban can contact them.
“Thanks to this project, today I was able to get medication for my mother (who has diabetes), which is in short supply throughout the country,” says dentist Ibis Montalbán.
Cabrera says it's difficult to see people suffering from a lack of medicine for their families.
“Many people cry, and we often cry with them,” but “Palomas created, in the midst of uncertainty, in the midst of scarcity, in the midst of much apathy…, a path of light.”
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