Luis Gomez, a former nuclear medicine technologist from Cuba who works as a personal trainer in South Florida, recently returned to Miami-Dade County with disturbing accounts of Cuba’s deepening healthcare crisis. The 34-year-old traveled to Santa Clara to support his 91-year-old grandmother who needed brain surgery at Hospital Provincial Clinico Quirurgico Arnaldo Milian Castro.
“Death! That’s what he said happened during every power outage at the Hospital Provincial Clinico Quirurgico Arnaldo Milian Castro,” Gomez said, describing the hellish conditions he witnessed. While taking a break at the gym where he works in Miami-Dade, Gomez said the hospital’s unsanitary conditions and sense of doom still haunt him.
“I had to get strength from anywhere,” Gomez said about his decision to leave the comforts of Miami-Dade to help his grandmother. With help from friends, Gomez paid about $800 for a plane ticket from Miami International Airport, traveling with medical supplies for his grandmother’s surgical team and food due to shortages on the island.
Gomez said he did what he could to help strangers in need and paid men to clean rooms at the hospital, though none of it was enough to address the systemic problems. His grandmother’s surgery was ultimately successful, and he returned home to Miami-Dade with hope that President Donald Trump’s intervention will stop the suffering.
Julio Cesar Rodriguez Cardona, the general director of health for the Cerros municipality of Havana, recently told CBC News that the national health system is in crisis. “It’s scary just to think about it,” Rodriguez Cardona told CBC News about the current state of Cuba’s healthcare infrastructure.
Staff working at the Havana Cardiology Institute also told CBC News that patients face surgery delays of months, and there are shortages of pacemakers and medications. These reports corroborate Gomez’s firsthand observations of the deteriorating conditions throughout Cuba’s medical facilities.
After witnessing the crisis in Santa Clara, Gomez said he now fully supports U.S. military intervention in Cuba. “If they did it in Venezuela, Cuba should be next,” Gomez said, referencing potential American action in the region.
Trump and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel have acknowledged there were U.S.-Cuba talks, though the outcome of these discussions remains unclear as Cuba’s humanitarian crisis continues to worsen.