When the Mind Is Hungry Too
HAVANA TIMES – Mental health in Cuba stopped being a secret kept inside consulting rooms; today, it is part of our daily conversations. How could we not talk about the mind when the reality we live in pushes us to the limit? Shortages, blackouts, uncertainty, and emigration shape us from the inside, even if it’s hard for us to admit it.
Stress builds up; it gets tattooed on our skin, our nerves, in sleep that brings no rest. Living feels like carrying an invisible weight on your back that never comes off. The problem isn’t just food, transport, or medicine, though they matter, it’s the future that slowly slips through our fingers. We’re always in “survival mode,” and there’s no room left to breathe.
The health system that was once the pride of this country’s leaders also reflects that exhaustion. Many health professionals have left in search of other life options, some are on missions abroad, and those who remain face severe shortages. Hospitals are in ruins, supplies and medicines are lacking. What should be a process of care often ends in forced hospitalizations or simple sedations that resolve little.
Talking about anxiety, depression, or trauma is still uncomfortable. There are families for whom “that’s weakness,” “you just have to stop being silly and endure like everyone else.” To avoid the stigma, many people continue suffering without asking for help.
In my neighborhood, we have a neighbor who has lived this firsthand. For years he struggled with mental health issues and had remained stable with the right medication. But when those medicines became scarce and without close family to buy them for him on the informal market, he ended up on the street.
Nearly three months speaking to himself, sitting on curbs, sleeping in doorways, under the rain or the sun, surviving thanks to food from neighbors. Only after the persistent pleas of those same neighbors did the authorities pick him up and institutionalize him. Stories like this reflect a system that can no longer support those who need it most.
Mental health is not just an individual matter, and this crisis is a reminder of that. It is social justice; it is the right to live in a country where obtaining the basics is not a sacrifice. A person exhausted and afraid becomes sick at the root.
In Cuba, the mind is hungry too. But if we look at ourselves in the mirror with honesty, we can recognize those small gestures of resistance: the smile that flows despite adversity, the will to keep reinventing each day, the friends who listen without judgment, the neighbor who shares the little they have, the WhatsApp group created so that no one feels alone.
Fortunately, recognizing pain doesn’t make us weak; on the contrary, it makes us more human. Perhaps that humanity we still have left will help us in the healing process, or at least keep us from ending up like my neighbor, reciting incomprehensible prayers to the wind.