Last week, a video of a Cuban man’s final moments went viral on X. The man, whom many guessed to be in thirties, was skin and bones and wearing a medical mask, and he’d told those nearby that he felt unwell before sitting down on a bench outside on a public sidewalk.
While he was sitting there, he simply slumped over and died. According to witnesses, his corpse remained there for many long hours under the Havana sun. Some tried to close his eyes, providing a little dignity. Others asked for a sheet to cover him. On one version of the video, you can hear someone say, “He died there sitting… he died of hunger, from the virus and the diseases.” (Warning: You may find the video below disturbing.)
Cubano se muere en la calle, así, sin más. Es una combinación de causas: dengue, hambre, mala higiene, estrés…
Envíale esto a esa persona que a pesar de toda la información disponible, sigue hablando bien del castrismo y de la vida en Cuba.pic.twitter.com/Mws07bTiap— José Cemí (@CemiHolding) November 25, 2025
Last I checked, no one knows what his cause of death was, but you probably just guess from any of the number of issues currently plaguing the country and get lucky. Cuba is currently a perfect storm for a random death.
Malnutrition. Hunger from food shortages. Many only eat by digging through the trash of others. Poverty, inflation, and repression are at their worst levels in decades, and people are stressed. An estimated 89% of them live in extreme poverty. The country that once had a stellar medical system is now filled with overwhelmed hospitals, medical supply shortages, and dilapidated facilities, while the regime exports its medical providers to other countries under its slave-like forced labor program. Garbage remains piled in the streets for weeks and months at a time, creating sanitation hazards, and blackouts are now the norm, not the exception, sometimes lasting most of the day, even in Havana. Many lack clean water.
As if that wasn’t enough, disease is running rampant. That’s why the man was wearing a mask. What the regime — or much of the media — won’t tell you is that Cuba is currently facing at least three simultaneous epidemics right now — dengue, chikungunya, and oropouche — and while it’s impossible to access real numbers, a third or more of the entire island’s population has gotten sick.
Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne illness that can cause muscle and joint pain, rash, headache, vomiting, swollen glands, and, in severe cases, blood vessel damage that leads to shock, internal bleeding, and organ failure. Severe cases are typically fatal. Chikungunya is also virus spread through mosquito bites. The symptoms are similar to dengue, and while it’s rarely fatal, it can cause debilitating pain that lasts for a few days up to a few months. Oropouche is typically spread through midges, though mosquitos can spread it too, and it causes fever, severe headache, chills, muscle aches, and joint pain that lasts for up to a week.
Cases of all three diseases have popped up all year and worsened in July, but they surged in September. By October, they reached “combined epidemiological crisis” levels. Flooding from Hurricane Melissa combined with the poor sanitation conditions in the country contributed to the surge. There’s not enough fuel to run the mosquito fumigation trucks. Infrastructure is in such bad shape that leaking pipes lead to stagnant water that allow for increased mosquito breeding, and there is a lack of available screens for windows and doors, but the increasing number of blackouts make it difficult to keep them closed.
Many people didn’t even know what hit them. Labs and hospitals lack the reagents to do proper testing. ICUs are filled with sick and dying kids. Hospitals must ration IVs. Pharmacies are out of even the most basic of medications.
The Communist regime, which Miguel Díaz-Canel currently leads, initially claimed that everything was just fine. “[The illnesses] are neither new, nor rare, nor unknown,” Cuban Minister of Public Health José Ángel Portal Miranda said back in October. “No one can hide an epidemic or deaths,” he claimed, while doing just that.
Dr. Francisco Durán García, national director of epidemiology, declared there were no deaths from the diseases, and hospitals were not overwhelmed.
The people living in these horrific conditions told a different story.
In the Cuban city of Mantanzas, the epicenter of the crisis, journalist Yirmara Torres Hernández wrote last month that the people “are facing their worst moment with 22-hour power outages, lack of water…Sick and without the basic resources to face these arboviruses that surprised us and left us stranded. That’s the truth. An entire town is witness to it. Can you deny the truth of an entire town?”
She added, “Matanzas looks like a zombie city today… that’s how we walk, bent over, in pain… You just have to go out into the street and look… and see… and observe…” Here’s more (translated from Spanish):
No, people weren’t alarmist… No, the networks weren’t lying. The people are not wrong. We must listen to them more, through all available channels. There’s an epidemic spreading through the country today. In Matanzas, there are very few left to get infected. Everyone on my block has already fallen ill…
‘We’ll be dropping like flies,’ a neighbor who works in Health told me… and that’s exactly what happened. No investigation is needed to know how many people got sick… Just conduct an online survey and you’ll know… If entire city blocks are infected, almost entire towns, almost entire families… The statistics aren’t that hard to come up with. Don’t you think?In my neighborhood, by the way, nobody ever came to investigate or fumigate inside the homes… One day a tractor passed by, making more noise than smoke. And here we have several healthcare workers who alerted us through their channels. It’s not necessary anymore… it’s over. And we got through it alone… luckily, thanks to that beautiful solidarity that characterizes us and that has made us neighbors come together and help each other, whether with paracetamol tablets, rehydration salts, or carrying buckets of water. That’s our luck… and that, I think, is what saves us…I only pray for Havana… that these arboviruses don’t spread there and that the majority of the population doesn’t get sick.
I hope no one dies (not from the virus itself, perhaps, but from the complications it causes in those with underlying health conditions)… as has happened and continues to happen in Matanzas. I hope not. Human life is sacred… and we must protect it…
Between July and November, the illnesses have spread to all 15 of Cuba’s provinces.
In Old Havana, 81-year-old Pilar Alcantara told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that “everything hurts.” The elderly woman who lives alone is so sick she can’t walk, and spends her time just “lying weakly on a couch in her dilapidated living room.” The sidewalk outside her home is piled with garbage.
Fidela Freire, 61, told AFP that she had to wait out on the symptoms on an empty stomach. “You can’t even buy chicken,” she said, adding that even acetaminophen was not available at any pharmacy to help with the pain.
It’s so bad that other countries, like the Dominican Republic and Ecuador, are starting to see cases of the viruses that originated in Cuba.
Over the last couple of weeks, the regime has finally had no choice but to admit that there is a problem. However, they do not admit the extent of it, calling it “manageable,” using vague terms to describe it, and avoiding any actual transparency when it comes to numbers. Then again, so many of the people have been forced to face the crisis alone that there is no way to actually know how many have been impacted. They’ve hinted at COVID-19-style lockdowns — more repression, at least that’s how the Cuban people saw it — and claim they’ve sprung into action to combat the mosquito population.
But despite all the talk, they’re not doing a damn thing. The situation is out of control and growing. Meanwhile, they’re focused on coercing men into spilling their blood for Russia in the war in Ukraine and forcing doctors on slave-labor missions in Venezuela and Mexico, propping up Nicolás Maduro and Claudia Sheinbaum. The only lifelines they have left.
They block aid from anyone who tries to help. They blame their own citizens. They blame the weather. They blame the United States’ embargo. But the only one to blame is the communist regime itself.
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