Cuban doctors face blackouts, burnout as once-vaunted healthcare declines

Inside Havana's hospitals, doctors and nurses are showing up to work exhausted — not from their shifts, but from the sleepless nights that precede them.

Cuba's healthcare system, long celebrated as a crown jewel of the 1959 revolution, is buckling under the weight of a collapsing economy and the bite of U.S. economic sanctions, with conditions worsening sharply following a U.S. oil blockade imposed this year.

"We get tired, obviously, but we are fighters and we give everything to provide good care despite the fatigue we experience every day," said Lisandra Gonzalez, a nurse at one of Havana's major hospitals, citing relentless power cuts and heat at home as daily obstacles before she even arrives at work.

The numbers behind the crisis are stark. Some 96,000 Cubans are currently on a surgical waiting list — 11,000 of them children — and Cuba's Public Health Ministry warns that figure could balloon to 160,000 by year's end. More than 300 pediatric operations each week are hampered by shortages of medicine, oxygen, or anesthesia, and some 32,000 pregnant women risk missing their recommended minimum of three ultrasound exams.

Dr. Fernando Trujillo, National Director of Hospital Services at Havana's Ministry of Public Health, acknowledged the toll, saying Cuba has been forced to slash its annual surgeries from over 1.2 million to around 700,000, with priority given to the most urgent cases. "We have had waiting lists, patients pending surgical treatment," he said, attributing the cuts "fundamentally to the blockade."

Many doctors are already voting with their feet. Physicians in Cuba's state-run system earn the equivalent of just $14 to $16 a month under the unofficial exchange rate, and growing numbers are abandoning medicine altogether to wait tables or clean houses — or leaving the country entirely.

Production: Alien Fernandez, Mario Fuentes, Liamar Ramos/Reuters