14ymedio, Havana, 9 May 2022 — Cuban doctor Alexander Pupo Casas left Cuba this Sunday, as he himself announced on his social networks. The doctor published an image at the foot of the InterCaribbean Airways plane with the text “Goodbye, my beautiful Cubita.”
According to the independent newspaper CiberCuba, which was able to contact Pupo Casas this Monday, the doctor is now making a stopover in a country that he did not want to reveal so as not to give details to the immigration authorities of the route he plans to follow. “My whole family stayed in Cuba. God allow me to at least see them again one day,” he said.
“I would never allow my roots to be affected by a new status quo. What I wish would go away is the pain in my chest since I boarded the plane. I have never felt like this,” he said on his Facebook profile.
Pupo Casas had asked for financial help almost a month ago through his social networks to be able to leave Cuba, a decision he made when he was aware that he would not be able to practice his profession on the island.
Shortly after finding himself off the island and without specifying which country he had arrived in, the doctor shared a video on his YouTube channel where, with a broken voice, he stated that he was leaving Cuba “with a knot in his heart… My heart is broken, totally broken, I hope that with the passing of the hours this pain will improve.”
“Leaving Cuba for me has been the worst thing that could have happened to me in the world, having to leave my country, but I have the hope that one day I will be able to return when I am free or to fight to be free,” Pupo said.
The doctor resigned from his job at the Ernesto Guevara hospital in Las Tunas, where he was doing his residency in Neurosurgery, after denouncing that they planned to expel him to relocate him to another destination for having criticized the regime on the internet.
“I am leaving medical services in Las Tunas, but not medicine. I will continue working tirelessly to improve as a doctor and as a person. I will be waiting, and I will provide my services one day in any hospital that requests my help, but without imposing a political thinking or an ideology that I don’t believe in,” he said in September 2020, when he still had hopes of being able to move forward in the country.
However, last month he publicly admitted that there was nothing to be done. “I was hoping that something would happen that would prevent me from having to leave my country. I like living here, not under this regime, but I like my country and I had to take some time to reach the conclusion of emigrating,” he recounted.
The doctor tried to make a living in different alternative ways, including the sale of audiovisuals or USB flash drives, but ended up giving in to the evidence that, under the current circumstances, it would be impossible for him to continue. “I haven’t been able to work here for more than two years. I don’t have family abroad and I’m appealing to my supporters. I don’t have property in Cuba to finance my departure from the country.”
Thus, the doctor joins the long list of Cubans who leave Cuba not only because of economic difficulties, like so many thousands in recent months, but because of harassment by State Security.
Before him, Alexander Figueredo, also a doctor, left the island, although he was initially prevented from boarding a flight to Nicaragua, where he was scheduled to begin his journey, like thousands of compatriots since Daniel Ortega abolished the visa requirement for Cubans. The doctor, expelled from his job in April 2021 for criticizing the state of the health system, which the regime considered caused “moral damage,” left Cuba although his whereabouts are unknown, since he did not want to reveal it.
In March it was Manuel Guerra, a doctor at the Nicodemus Regalado Hospital in Holguín, from which he was expelled for his activism in the Archipelago, who left the island for the United States, where he has settled with his wife.
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