Bitter pill: Cuba runs low on life-saving medicines
Agence France-Presse
Cuban Jessica Rodriguez never knows if she will find the medicines that keep her four-year-old son alive in a country that has all but run out of essential drugs. On a near daily basis she sprints from one state-run pharmacy to another on a quest for pills and syringes. Increasingly, she has to turn to the black market and pay the higher prices there. That is if they have what she needs. Rodriguez, who left her job as a physiotherapist to care for her sickly son, receives a monthly state grant of less than $12. Her husband's salary is not much more. And as Cuba sinks ever deeper into its worst economic crisis in decades — with critical shortages also of food and fuel, regular power blackouts and rampant inflation — Rodriguez fears that one day the drugs may run out altogether.
"It drives me crazy," the 27-year-old said at her home in Havana's Santa Fe neighbourhood as her son Luis Angelo, watched a cartoon on her mobile. "Missing a dose, not having the suction tubes, a catheter that cannot be replaced... all can lead to serious illnesses which can cost him his life."
Luis Angelo was born with a deformed esophagus, and while he waits to receive a transplant, breathes through a tracheostomy and eats though a tube inserted into his stomach. He is also asthmatic, has a heart condition, and suffers epileptic fits. The boy takes seven different drugs daily, and needs a variety of tubes, syringes and other equipment to administer them. Cuba, reputed for supplying highly trained medical doctors to other countries and for its advanced domestic pharmaceutical industry, has long counted vaccines and medical services among its top exports.
Under US sanctions since 1962, and hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic that all but tanked its tourism industry, the communist country is now no longer medically self-sufficient.
Last year, the island nation of 9.7 million people could not afford the $300 million needed to import the raw materials it needed to produce hundreds of critical medicines.
In Havana, and further afield, pharmacy shelves are bare and hospitals lack basic supplies such as gauze, suturing thread, disinfectant and oxygen. "There are days when there's nothing," a doctor in the capital said on condition of anonymity. Cuba's healthcare system is public and meant to be universally accessible. Private pharmacies, clinics and hospitals are illegal.
Patients who require chronic medicine are issued with a document known as a "tarjeton," which allows them access to subsidized medicines. Luis Angelo has a "tarjeton," but it is of little use if pharmacies don't have the drugs, said his mom.
On the black market, she is forced to pay $3 to $4 for a blister sheet of pills — about a quarter of the average monthly Cuban salary at the unofficial exchange rate.
"The price is cruel," Rodriguez said.
Confronted with the ever-worsening medicine shortage, the government has since 2021 allowed travellers to bring back food and medicines in their luggage — though not for resale.
Some of these drugs are feeding a black market that profits from the desperately infirm with sales via WhatsApp or internet sites. Other sites, however, offer drugs for free or barter them for food.
In the NGO sphere, projects have also emerged to provide medicines to Cubans free of charge.
One, dubbed Palomas, has helped tens of thousands of people since its creation in Havana in 2021.
It relies on medicines that people have "left over from a treatment, or were brought by someone from abroad," coordinator Sergio Cabrera told AFP.
Every day, in 13 WhatsApp groups, Palomas publishes a list of medicines it has available, and another list of those it needs.
One beneficiary was 32-year-old dentist Ibis Montalban, who said she managed to get her mother's chronic diabetes medication through Palomas, adding: "thank you, thank you, thank you."
Cabrera says it is hard to witness the suffering of people in need. "Many people cry here, and many times we cry with them," he said, grateful that Palomas can at least offer " a ray of hope."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gulf Today
3 hours ago
- Gulf Today
Gaza civil defence says 37 more Palestinians killed by Israeli fire
Gaza's civil defence agency said at least 37 people were killed by Israeli fire on Saturday, including 30 civilians who were waiting to collect aid. Israel's offensive has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, according to Hamas-run Gaza's health ministry, figures the United Nations says are reliable. Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told the media that 12 people were killed and nearly 200 wounded when Israeli forces opened fire on them as they gathered near a border crossing in northern Gaza that has been used for aid deliveries. Six more people were killed and 30 wounded after Israeli troops targeted civilians assembling near an aid point in central Gaza, he said. This photo shows the devastation of an Israeli strike that hit Gaza. AFP Strikes in central Gaza also resulted in multiple casualties, according to Bassal, while a drone attack near the southern city of Khan Yunis killed at least three people and wounded several others. Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties accessing swathes of the territory mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defence and the Israeli military. Thousands of Palestinians congregate daily near food distribution points in Gaza, including four managed by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Since launching in late May, its operations have been marred by almost-daily reports of Israeli forces firing on those waiting to collect aid. Israeli restrictions on the entry of supplies into Gaza since the start of the war nearly two years ago have led to shortages of food and essential supplies, including medicine and fuel, which hospitals require to power their generators. Palestinians check the devastation following an Israeli strike in Gaza City. Agence France-Presse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces mounting pressure to agree to a ceasefire to bring the territory's more than two million people back from the brink of famine and free the hostages held by Palestinian fighters. But early Friday, the Israeli security cabinet approved plans for a major operation to seize Gaza City, triggering a wave of outrage across the globe. Despite the backlash and rumours of dissent from Israeli military top brass, Netanyahu has remained defiant over the decision. In a post on social media late Friday, he said "we are not going to occupy Gaza -- we are going to free Gaza from Hamas". The Palestinian militant group, whose October 7, 2023 attack triggered the war, has slammed the plan to expand the fighting as a "new war crime". Hamas's 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. Agence France-Presse
Al Etihad
2 days ago
- Al Etihad
Suspect, officer dead after shooting outside US public health agency in Atlanta
9 Aug 2025 09:00 ATLANTA (NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE)A gunman who believed the coronavirus vaccine was to blame for his ailments opened fire Friday outside of the headquarters of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing a police officer and striking the exteriors of several buildings on the CDC campus, law enforcement officials gunman was found fatally shot, but no civilians were hit by gunfire, officials reported an active shooter just before 5pm local time at a CVS drugstore on Clifton Road, which is directly across from the main entrance to the CDC headquarters. Officers found the gunman on the second floor of the CVS, but it was unclear if he had been struck in an exchange of gunfire with the police or if the gunshot was self-inflicted, Chief Darin Schierbaum of the Atlanta Police Department said at a news conference Friday said that investigators believed there was a single gunman, whose identity has not been man appeared to have had a long-brewing fixation about the vaccine, according to a senior law enforcement official who spoke anonymously to discuss an ongoing investigation. The official added that the man believed that the shot had been the cause of his physical illness. The man's father had reported him to authorities earlier Friday, saying that he was David Rose of the DeKalb County Police Department was one of the first officers to arrive and was killed, officials 33, had two children, and his wife is pregnant with a third. He was just a few weeks from his first anniversary with the department. He had graduated from training in March and had served in the US Marines before becoming an shooting comes as the COVID vaccine - an achievement that curbed the spread of a deadly global pandemic but also became the subject of rampant conspiracy theories and intense political divisions - has faced renewed skepticism since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health and human services has raised doubts about many routine immunisations and has been particularly critical of the COVID vaccinations. This week, he cancelled nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for work on mRNA vaccines, the technology that helped turn the tide against the CDC is an institution at the core of Atlanta's identity, with the city regarded as a capital of public health and research in large part because of the federal agency's roots. The headquarters are in the northeast corner of the city, adjacent to the main campus of Emory University and Emory University Hospital. The CVS store is in a complex with restaurants and apartments that is home to medical students and public health workers.
Gulf Today
4 days ago
- Gulf Today
Doctors decry RFK Jr decision to slash vaccine grants
Julia Musto, The Independent Doctors are sounding the alarm about potentially deadly consequences of the Donald Trump administration's decision to slash $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine development, saying the "deeply troubling" move could leave Americans defenceless in the face of a biological attack, or another pandemic. Leading physicians and vaccine specialists were among the medical and scientific experts who told The Independent that years of progress had been lost, including the lessons learned during Covid. "This is a deeply troubling development that will, in the short term, leave the US poorly prepared for a pandemic or biological attack, and, in the long term, stifle medical innovation upon which so many Americans depend for life saving cures," Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, said in an email. Health and Human Services Sec. Robert F Kennedy Jr announced on Tuesday the termination of 22 projects, including contracts with Emory University and Covid shot-makers Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca. "We're shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate," Kennedy said. While Kennedy, who has questioned Covid vaccine safety and previously falsely claimed the measles vaccine contains foetal debris, cited a review of "the science" in terminating the project. But Dr Nuzzo said the "attack on mRNA vaccine technology rests on phony and false claims, proven so by real facts and evidence". She continued: "It is, however, aligned with his long-held and deadly determination to sow doubts about all vaccines and to restrict the ability of the American people to access vaccines. Our nation will pay dearly for this decision in dollars and lives." The mRNA vaccines work differently from traditional vaccines, which inject a weakened virus into the body to trigger an immune response. Instead, mRNA vaccines teach the cells to make small and harmless pieces of virus that trigger the same response. The anti-vaxxer movement and Kennedy have inaccurately claimed that mRNA Covid vaccines are deadly and that vaccines "poisoned" American children but they are safe according to decades of public research and countless government assessments. The only mRNA vaccines currently available are Covid vaccines. They were able to be brought to market so quickly because scientists didn't need the virus to make them, and the vaccine material can be created in a lab. Research also has been underway to produce mRNA vaccines against cancer and other infectious diseases, work that has been going on for decades. "While most would associate mRNA vaccine technology with Covid, it was in development for over half a century and the US government's partnership in that development goes back decades," Richard Hughes IV, a former vice president of public policy at mRNA vaccine manufacturer Moderna who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University Law School, told The Independent. "These kinds of partnerships are what drive innovation and save us from public health emergencies. When we lose this kind of progress, we create future public health risks." Scientists know it's only a matter of time before the next pandemic, when vaccines may once again be needed en masse. Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious diseases physician and Clinical Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, said that no other vaccine technology could provide the world with a vaccine as quickly as is need during a pandemic. He noted that Kennedy's decision was rewriting the history of the pandemic and the lifesaving track record of mRNA vaccines. "Vaccines aren't some niche drug. We're not talking about some rare skin cancer drug. We're talking about medicines that apply to literally every human being on the planet and we should have learned from the Covid pandemic that everyone is potentially susceptible to pandemic," Dr Scott said. In what experts have labelled an assault on science, the Trump administration has eliminated grants and dramatically reduced the workforce of federal health and science agencies. Theses actions, and Kennedy's mRNA cuts, are likely in response to government vaccine mandates and restrictions, Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Independent.
