MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. — Luis Gomez, a former nuclear medicine technologist in Cuba who works as a personal trainer in South Florida, said he had videos and photos of Cubans’ hellish nightmare.
Gomez, 34, said he recently returned to Miami-Dade County from Santa Clara, where the deepening humanitarian crisis hit a new low.
“Death!” That’s what he said happened during every power outage during his time at the Hospital Provincial Clinico Quirurgico Arnaldo Milian Castro.
While taking a break at the pristine gym where he works out in Miami-Dade, Gomez said the hospital’s unsanitary conditions and sense of gloom and doom still haunt him.
Gomez said he recently left the comforts of Miami-Dade to help support his beloved 91-year-old grandmother, who needed to undergo brain surgery in Santa Clara.
With the help of his friends, Gomez paid about $800 for a plane ticket out of Miami International Airport. He said that during his trip, there were many times when he wanted to break down and cry.
“I had to get strength from anywhere,” Gomez said.
Since the island is dealing with shortages, Gomez traveled with medical supplies for his grandmother’s surgical team and as much food as he could fit in his luggage.
Gomez said the need was so obvious that he found himself doing what he could to help strangers in need and paid men to clean rooms at the hospital. None of it, he said, was enough.
His grandmother’s surgery was a success, so he returned home to Miami-Dade with hope that President Donald Trump’s more definitive intervention will soon stop Cubans’ suffering.
Julio Cesar Rodriguez Cardona, the general director of health for the Cerros municipality of Havana, recently told CBC News, a Canadian broadcaster, that the national health system is in crisis.
“It’s scary just to think about it,” Rodriguez Cardona told CBC News.
Staff working at the Havana Cardiology Institute also told CBC News that patients face surgery delays of months, and there are shortages of pacemakers and medications.
In Miami-Dade, Gomez said that after his time in Santa Clara, he fully supports a U.S. military intervention in Cuba.
“If they did it in Venezuela, Cuba should be next,” Gomez said.
Trump and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel have acknowledged there were U.S.-Cuba talks after the U.S. stopped the flow of Venezuelan and Mexican oil to the island’s government.
Trump tasked Secretary of State Marco Rubio with leading the talks. Rubio has opposed the Cuban medical missions as forced labor, human trafficking, and a source of revenue for a corrupt regime.
The status of the U.S.-Cuba talks was unclear on Wednesday. But without a deal soon, or a change by force, Gomez feared that conditions in the communist island are likely to worsen.
“Whatever they are going to do, they have to do it now,” Gomez said.
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