The shortage of medicines in Ciego de Ávila, aggravated by the restrictions of the US blockade on the import of raw materials, forces the Avilanian pharmacy network to guarantee only 10% of the national basic list, while giving priority protection to children and pregnant women.
There is a silent way in which the blockade enters Avilanian homes: it is not always announced by a prolonged blackout or a breaking news headline. Sometimes it slips in, rather, on the empty shelf of a neighbourhood pharmacy, in the tired gaze of someone looking for an antihypertensive that does not appear, in the pocket of a mother who needs vaginal pessaries for her daughter and only finds the word «out of stock.»
Dulce María Fernández Martínez, General Director of the Provincial Pharmacy and Optics Company in Ciego de Ávila, says it without mincing words: the impact is deep because it affects people’s health. And the figures, cold as figures tend to be, leave no room for doubt. Of the national basic list of 603 medicines, the province currently lacks 306. However, due to logistics and fuel shortages, about 151 more medicines are added to the national deficit, bringing the total to 457 unavailable in our warehouses. In fact, the Avilanian network works, in practice, with barely 10% of that basic list.
The origin, the director explains, is not in the lack of domestic industry — Cuba has a medical-pharmaceutical industry she herself describes as strong — but in the impossibility of importing raw materials and packaging materials: cases, blisters, bottles. Without them, even the most capable factory cannot complete the cycle.
Antibiotics, antihypertensives, sedatives for an ageing population, anticonvulsants that directly affect the daily lives of children, medicines for heart patients: the list of shortages spans entire generations. And within the so-called controlled-card medicines — 84 in total, those the system reserves for more delicate treatments — 47 are currently unavailable, and those that do arrive come with a coverage that does not reach all the population in need.
Faced with this scenario, the company has opted for a decision of social weight: to protect, despite everything, the Maternal and Child Health Programme. Young children and pregnant women — including those with hypertension — receive priority with what little there is. It is not that the shortage is accepted without more, Fernández Martínez stresses; it is that there is a deliberate national backing towards that group.
The economic cost is also felt. The company, a national vanguard in 2025 with 22 million pesos in profits and revenues exceeding 124 million, has seen its monthly income fall from 10 to 6 million pesos: a loss of 4 million each month, a direct consequence of the lack of medicines and raw materials to produce them in the province.
Faced with adversity, the company seeks air in the economic transformations currently sweeping the country. Of the 176 measures approved for the socialist state enterprise, 17 directly affect the Avilanian Pharmacy and Optics. One of them is already visible: the recent opening of the Farmatodo shop, where products outside the basic list are sold, and the leasing of premises that generate additional income.
«I want to convey what all my workers in the Avilanian pharmacy network feel,» says the director, and in that phrase fits an entire province that resists, every day, with the shelf half-empty and the will intact.
