The Death of a Cuban Doctor
HAVANA TIMES – On September 24, 2025, Dr. Nestor Manuel Perez Lache, 85-year-old Cuban doctor took his own life by jumping off an elevated Havana bridge.
An investigator of the human brain
Dr. Perez was an eminent professional, specialized in neurology, and a professor at the Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery and at the “Dr. Carlos J. Finlay” Military Hospital. He also had a clinic at the elite Medical-Surgical Research Center (CIMEQ), where he attended the most privileged members of the Cuban establishment.
Author of books and innumerable research articles, Perez was a permanent member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences and in 2017 received the Prize for Scientific Merit, in recognition of his life’s work. His colleagues called him an “emblematic professor,” and a “colossal figure of national medicine.”
According to Rickee Estrada’s Facebook post, Dr. Perez Lache left his wife a note announcing what he was going to do, “as if he wanted to prove that gravity is more reliable than human reason.”
The son of a bus driver and a housewife, Dr. Perez saved many lives and trained numerous disciples, filling the ranks of the medical profession in Cuba and of the complicated specialty he practiced and had been passionate about since childhood. He studied “not only to become a doctor, but to fulfill my vocation as a neurologist.”
According to the doctor’s own published testimonies, his mother didn’t have any more children in order to be able to afford the cost of higher education for him (this was in the 1950s). He was the first intellectual and university graduate in his family. He began to study neurosurgery in depth in 1970 in Japan, with Professor Dr. Narabayashi, who treated Parkinson’s disease. Upon his return to Cuba, he was able within weeks to implement the techniques he had learned. During the following year, his team performed some 40 surgeries.
“A man who dedicated his entire life to saving minds… but couldn’t save his own. (…) The neurologist who studied brains couldn’t decipher his own,” commented Rickee Estrada.
According to Dr. Julio Gonzalez Pages, also a university professor and one of the first to promote gender studies in Cuba, Perez Lache had been suffering from deep depression and had recently been hospitalized several times for it. His death “further opens the debate on mental health in older adult Cuban males in the current multi-faceted crisis,” Dr, Gonzalez notes.
None of that is indicated in the photos of him circulating on social media, especially those of his orphaned Facebook profiles. In these, we see a smiling Professor Perez, in the company of his wife, or with historic photographs behind him. He was a scientist who studied epilepsy, invented new techniques, participated in research conducted after the joint Cuba-USSR space flight in 1980, and in other research regarding the neuropathy epidemic that rocked the country in 1994-5 during the Special Period crisis, due to the scarcity of essential nutrients. Clearly, for him it wasn’t a matter of serving a nation or its leaders, but of satisfying the curiosity that lies behind every true scientist, in the name of those who suffer.
A military doctor
Perez was part of the first class of doctors to graduate after the 1959 Revolution, and was one of the eight doctors who received their degrees directly from Fidel Castro. Following the call of the Cuban leadership, he joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces. He still held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Reserve when he died.
It’s noteworthy that the cause of his decision was probably not economic. People in Cuba with the status of this highly qualified military doctor do not usually suffer from material deprivation.
While the official media do not seem interested in clarifying the circumstances of his death, there is a wave of details, comments, and assessments on social media. As is often the case in this country when it comes to a beloved personality who has helped many, the majority of the posts express solidarity with his family and shared grief, regardless of whether the writer belongs to the opposition or the pro-government camp.
Professor Gonzalez emphasizes the vulnerability of older men in Cuba, while opposition figure Lara Crofs recalls that the deceased doctor was also her friend, whom she remembers “with respect, affection, and gratitude for all he gave.”
Lucio Enriquez Nodarse, also a doctor was quoted in Cubanet as saying: “He committed suicide, a victim of the same executioner he served.” However, he goes on to describe Perez as “a guide and mentor whose passion for neurology was contagious,” and his departure “leaves a void that cannot be filled.”
For myself, as for many others, the death of this great neuro-surgeon was linked to current conditions on the island.
Cuba, suicides, and mental health
Attorney and researcher Ramon Garcia Guerra posted on his Facebook page that the tendency towards suicide is proportional with the rise of inflation. Along with others, he considers suicide to be “a critical symptom of the deep social malaise and economic difficulties the Cuban population is experiencing.”
Since the nineteenth century, Cuba has been among the Latin American countries with the highest suicide rates. Books have been written about this. I don’t want to delve into the sad statistics here, nor fog the issue with names and cases, but in terms of notable personalities who have taken their own lives, I believe that the post-revolutionary period has been more a continuity than a rupture with the pre-1959 era.
I would note that globally, men are more vulnerable to suicide than women, with the only reported exceptions being China and Bangladesh.
That a neurologist and expert on the human mind should leave us in this way is alarming and especially painful. In their posts about the eminent doctor’s passing, many social media users pointed out the need to focus more on aspects of mental health we normally don’t talk about, especially on the problem of “caring for those who care.”
As I suggested earlier, Dr. Perez’s status does not seem to fit with the idea that material deprivation was the reason he took his own life.
Although perhaps in some way it was. Not his own deprivation, he who was an enthusiastic researcher, a beloved teacher, and a healer of others’ pain. But precisely pain, the deprivation of others, the unmanageable social crisis, and a revolution to which he devoted his whole heart and mind, but which today is sinking.
Despite attempts to maintain a resolute attitude: out of empathy, solidarity, and spiritual commitment to the very history of the people and their deepest intellectual energies, somewhere those attempts become desperate and despairing, a darkness that corrodes and kills from within.
Via diverse routes, Cuba is losing its best people.
Rest in peace, Dr. and Professor Nestor Manuel Perez Lache.