Patients swept aside as Cuba's healthcare system deteriorates

After two surgeries and several rounds of radiation therapy over the last four years to treat a tumor, Irisleydis Tristá has spent the past seven months unable to get a CT scan to determine whether the cancer has grown or spread.

- ANDREA RODRÍGUEZ

IRISLEYDIS Tristá, a cancer patient, at her home in Batabanó, Cuba, on Friday.

The CT scanner at Havana's Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital, the country's leading hospital, is broken. Doctors have told her that, because of a lack of resources, they cannot operate on her again in Cuba, she said.

"I feel like my life is in danger," Tristá, 34, a mother of a 13-year-old from Batabanó, a town 43 miles south of Havana, told the Associated Press. "I don't know if it has grown. We have no way of knowing," she said.

Cuba's once-vaunted system of free universal healthcare has deteriorated sharply. The crisis, analysts say, has been compounded by fuel shortages they attribute to tightened U.S. sanctions on the island's energy sector, worsening an economy that had already been struggling for years.

The Trump administration is pressuring Cuba's socialist government to implement major economic reforms and change its way of governance in return for a lifting of sanctions.