By AFP | 2025-07-11

HAVANA -- Cuban Jessica Rodriguez Romero 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 that are available there. That is, if it has 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 told AFP at her home in Havana's Santa Fe neighborhood as her son Luis Angelo watched a cartoon on her phone.

"Missing a dose, not having the suction tubes, a catheter that cannot be replaced... all can lead to serious illnesses that can cost him his life."

Luis Angelo was born with a deformed esophagus, and while he waits for a transplant, he breathes through a stoma and eats through a tube inserted into his stomach. He has asthma, a heart condition and 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 doctors to other countries and for having its own 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 inhabitants could not afford the $300 million necessary to import the raw materials it needed to produce hundreds of critical medicines.

'There's nothing'

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 told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Cuba's health care system is publicly funded and intended to be universally accessible. Private pharmacies, clinics and hospitals are illegal.

Patients who require chronic medicine receive 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 lack the drugs, said his mother.

On the black market, she must 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 told AFP.

'Ray of hope'

Confronted with the ever-worsening medicine shortage, the government has since 2021 allowed travelers 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 emerged to provide medicines to Cubans free of charge.

One, dubbed Palomas, has helped tens of thousands of Cubans since its creation in Havana in 2021.

It relies on medicines that patients 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."

It is hard to witness the suffering of Cubans in need, said Cabrera.

"Many people cry here, and many times we cry with them," he said, grateful that Palomas can at least offer "a ray of hope."