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For two months, Magalys Roque has been passing blood clots so large they keep blocking her urinary catheter, her family says. For one of those months, she has been lying in a bed at Abel Santamaría Hospital in Pinar del Río, Cuba, waiting for an operating room so doctors can perform a cystoscopy, a procedure relatives say they have been told the hospital cannot currently carry out.
Her niece, Sulexi Romeu, sent a letter denouncing the situation to Cubanos por el Mundo and other news outlets inside and outside Cuba, along with photos of her aunt at Abel Santamaría Cuadrado, the province’s main hospital. Roque has been fighting cancer for two years.
“A month of waiting for a woman sick with cancer, with persistent bleeding and repeated episodes of her catheter becoming blocked,” Romeu wrote.
Family says Abel Santamaría Hospital lacks operating room conditions
According to the family, Roque is admitted to Ward H. They say they have been told the hospital does not currently have the operating room conditions needed for the cystoscopy, a procedure in which a thin instrument with a camera is inserted through the urethra to examine the bladder.
Photos the family sent to Cubanos por el Mundo show a urine collection bag filled with dark red fluid and settled debris, and Roque lying in a bed on the ward.
“We are not asking for a favor. We are demanding an urgent medical solution,” the letter says.
The family blames the authorities, not the doctors
Romeu is careful not to blame the medical staff, who she says work with limited resources. Her complaint targets the hospital’s management, the Provincial Public Health Directorate, Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), and the government and Communist Party officials who answer for how those institutions are run.
The family is demanding that an operating room be made available immediately. If Abel Santamaría cannot do the procedure, they want Roque urgently transferred to a hospital that can, based on her doctors’ assessment.
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Romeu calls the letter “the first step.” If no one responds, she says she will take the case to other institutions, to human rights organizations and to social media. “Magalys Roque has a name, she has a family, she has a story, and she has the right to dignified medical care,” she wrote.
As of publication, neither the hospital nor the Provincial Health Directorate of Pinar del Río had commented publicly on the case.
A province where elective surgery is on hold
Roque’s wait comes as Pinar del Río struggles with blackouts and shortages. In February, provincial health director Sandra Ramírez Guzmán told state broadcaster Telepinar that medical services were being reorganized because of the energy and fuel crisis: emergency surgeries would continue, but elective procedures would be postponed. The Medibus patient transport service was cut to three times a week in the municipalities, with priority for pregnant women and cancer patients.
The strain is nationwide. In May, after a three-day visit to the island, officials from the UN humanitarian office (OCHA) and the World Health Organization said more than 100,000 patients in Cuba, including 11,000 children, were waiting for surgeries delayed by power cuts and supply shortages. They also warned that more than 12,000 people on chemotherapy faced possible interruptions to their treatment.
For Roque’s family, there is nothing elective about her case: she has cancer, she has been bleeding for two months, and her catheter keeps clogging.
Hers is one of a growing number of cases in which Cubans turn to the public because the health system is not answering. Others include a father pleading for a heart transplant for his 37-year-old son and a shortage of medicines to treat a heart attack in Bayamo (both in Spanish).
Cubanos por el Mundo will keep following the case and will update this story if health authorities respond or if Roque receives the procedure.
Read this story in Spanish: Paciente con cáncer lleva un mes esperando por una cistoscopia en el hospital Abel Santamaría de Pinar del Río.
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