Cuba Analysis speaks to doctors and patients at Havana’s Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital about the impact of the US blockade on Cuba’s healthcare system: delayed treatments, stranded medical supplies, broken equipment and patients waiting years for essential care.

Cubans are dying, not because of a lack of doctors but because of the US blockade. Since 2019, when the US government unleashed its “maximum pressure” strategy, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has risen by 148%, while the survival rate for children with cancer has fallen from 85% to 65%. More than 100,000 Cubans are waiting for surgery, including over 12,000 children.

Trump and Rubio claim to be acting in the interests of the Cuban people, but their economic warfare is a form of collective punishment, which is illegal under international law. Recently, Rubio admitted the real motivations behind the policy: ‘Every time they create a new mechanism in which they try to get out of the noose, we just close it off.’

The doctors we talk to describe what that policy means in practice.