A healthcare worker who returned in June says she has been unable to collect her savings in cash, while colleagues who remain in Luanda are suffering from payment delays.
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, October 8, 2026 – When Laura landed in Cuba in June, after three years on a medical mission in Angola, she brought with her a mixture of relief and exhaustion. She had left behind years of work, payment delays, and the hope that, at least upon returning, she would be able to access the money accumulated during her stay in the African country. Months later, she sums up the result with a blunt sentence: “I have not managed to receive a single cent.”
Her case gives a face to a complaint that has long circulated among Cuban brigades in Angola. Contracts managed by the Corporación Antillana Exportadora (Antex), which is linked to the Cuban military, establish that a large portion of the collaborators’ income is deposited in Cuba and provide for payment in dollars, subject to banking availability. In 2025, discontent led to tense meetings in Luanda, where several healthcare workers even threatened to sue the company because they were unable to withdraw their savings in foreign currency on the Island.
Laura, whose name has been changed to avoid reprisals, has gone “more than four times” to branches of the Banco Popular de Ahorro in the city of Sancti Spíritus, where she lives. She has submitted a request to withdraw dollars in cash but is still waiting. For now, she explains, she can only access MLC (Moneda Libremente Convertible, for electronic use only) and the balance on a Clásica card, in dollars, which can also be used to buy gasoline and even transfer funds from one to the other. The problem arises when she tries to turn those virtual numbers into real money.
With MLC stores out of stock, the alternative ends up where so many economic transactions by Cubans do: in the informal market
With MLC stores out of stock, the alternative ends up where so many economic transactions by Cubans do: in the informal market. “Sell the balance on the Clásica to get cash in pesos and then buy the dollars,” she explains. Each step involves a loss on the money she believed she was saving during three years.
The return was not the end of the logistical problems either. Laura says that on her flight and on one or two subsequent returns, Antex stopped guaranteeing transportation from Havana to the provinces. “They make you sign a paper saying that you agree to arrange transportation to your province; otherwise, you stay in Angola,” she says. She knows colleagues who have been in the African country for more than 20 months, waiting for there to be space on a flight to return.
Nor did the goods purchased during the mission arrive with her. The shipment must be arranged independently, and her belongings remain in Angola. Since the direct TAAG flight in June, she says, there has been no other direct connection to bring them back.
The Cuba she found after three years away does not resemble the one she left either. “As a bus driver would say, we are moving backward,” she jokes. Then she lists: “Misery, shortages, abandonment, mistreatment, crime, incompetence.” She returned to her former position in Public Health but did not last long. “I left it because my 5,000-peso salary is not enough for anything. You can earn more even selling candy.”
Her assessment of Angola is equally bitter. During the three years she was there, “there wasn’t even one” period when she received the 200 dollars a month she was supposed to receive for her expenses in the African country. Most of the time she received 100 dollars, and on two occasions she went two months without being paid. Complaints previously collected by 14ymedio also described systematic delays, problems with vacations, and professionals forced to extend their stays.
From Luanda, Daniel, a Cuban doctor currently working at the Hospital Materno Infantil do Camama Dr. Manuel Pedro Azancot de Menezes, confirms that little appears to have changed. “Delays have been the order of the day with the payment they are supposed to give us every month,” he says. “We thought that with everything that has happened with Cuban medical missions in other countries they were going to treat us better, but everything remains the same.”
Daniel hopes that pressure from Washington over medical cooperation agreements will reach Angola and push its authorities toward direct contracts with healthcare workers. He looks to Calabria as a reference, although the Italian model has not eliminated the transfer of part of the salary to the regime either: doctors interviewed there acknowledged that they hand over up to half of what they receive to the State.
Laura, by contrast, no longer expects reforms. When asked what she thinks of Antex, she answers bluntly: “The worst, they’re only there to collect money from you.” And when asked whether she would recommend a mission in Angola to a colleague, her answer is even more emphatic: “Not even to my worst enemy.” She does not wish on anyone, she says, “either the ordeal of living there without any response to anything or the bureaucracy and mistreatment from the moment you arrive at the airport until now.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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