14ymedio, Havana, 30 January 2024 — Cuban hospitals, whose crisis of supplies, facilities and personnel has been continually denounced by the population and the independent press, currently live on donations provided by governments and foreign organizations. This same Monday, the regime celebrated the help of 280 kilograms of expendable material from a new contributor: the Cuban doctors themselves sent on a mission to Djibouti, one of the poorest countries in Africa.
“Syringes, sterile gauze, tape, serums, granules and bladder catheters” arrived at the Doctor Antonio Luaces Iraola hospital in Ciego de Ávila from the hands of two doctors who, after five years in Djibouti, bring help from “the entire brigade.” ” – about 80 health workers – who work in that country, explained the local media Invasor.
With regards to the lives Cuban health workers in Djibouti, a “desert country, with temperatures of almost 50 degrees celsius,” where they worked “without water” caring for “a population suffering from unknown diseases, including the bite of poisonous snakes,” the newspaper states that “there is no money to pay” that effort.
Invasor tacitly recognized the alarming lack of resources in the “labyrinth of wards” of Ciego de Ávila’s Luaces hospital, where, it estimates, “the 280 kilograms of medical supplies (…) at this time must have already relieved or healed pain.”
Donations of all kinds and from a multitude of countries “saved” the Cuban state three million dollars last year
For their part, several medical centers in Santiago de Cuba received a total of 96 donations in 2023 from various countries and international organizations. The shipments have allowed them to continue to operate and renew part of their equipment to “maintain services despite the severe limitations,” the official newspaper Sierra Maestra reported this Sunday.
Italian ambulances, Japanese and Swiss incubators, American beds and mattresses, refrigerators, vaccines and X-ray and imaging equipment from Unicef and the United Nations, as well as supplies for oncological treatments and research from Spain, “saved” the Cuban State three million dollars last year, according to the newspaper.
Another shipment of 27 boxes worth 22,000 euros arrived last December at the Camilo Cienfuegos hospital in Sancti Spíritus thanks to the Valencian organization Esperanza sin Fronteras [Hope Without Borders], which said it had paid for the donation with “private contributions.”
The NGO also committed to paying for the necessary supplies to supply two hospitals and two polyclinics in the provincial capital, said the digital Valencia City, which insisted on the importance of this aid for “a country that suffers the very serious consequences of the situation” of instability that has been going on for years, and that is leading a decline in meeting the basic needs of the Cuban people.
Despite the difficulties on the Island, which range from finding the most common medicines to the stampede of health workers to other sectors or abroad, the Cuban State continues signing contracts to send doctors to other countries. This January the media L’Unione Sarda reported that the Italian region of Sardinia would receive 128 health workers and 30 nurses to alleviate the lack of medical personnel in that region.
Months earlier, last August, the Italian region of Calabria had already hired nearly 500 doctors from the Island out of “desperation,” since health workers from other countries refuse to assist them due to low salaries and they urgently needed staff.
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