Cubans wait for the Abdala vaccine against Covid-19 outside a medical office in Havana, June 23.

Cubans wait for the Abdala vaccine against Covid-19 outside a medical office in Havana, June 23.

Photo: Ernesto Mastrascusa/Zuma Press

Cubans poured into the streets Sunday to protest the government’s handling of the Covid crisis. As the virus races across Cuba, independent lawyers, medical professionals and civil-society groups on the island have begged Havana to allow international humanitarian aid to reach people directly. The regime refuses. Now the crisis is near cataclysmic proportions.

Havana wants the world to believe that Cuban hardship in healthcare is caused by the U.S. embargo. But food and medicine are exempt from the embargo. As Julie Chung, now acting assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, tweeted in April 2020 that the U.S. “routinely authorizes the export of humanitarian goods, agricultural products, medicine, and medical equipment to support the Cuban people.” Ms. Chung further noted that in 2019 the U.S. exported millions of dollars of medical goods to Cuba.

Cuba’s real problem is that it’s broke. And while all poor countries in the region have struggled to serve the public during Covid-19, only Cuba has made things worse by trying to use the pandemic as a way to earn hard currency for the ruling elite and boost its legitimacy around the world.

Shortages of medications for treatable illnesses in Cuba are routine. The contagious mite infestation of the skin known as scabies, for example, can be remedied with antibiotics and topical medicines like permethrin. Yet Cuban public-health officials have been helpless to stop it from spreading across the island.

“It’s horrible and exasperating to see your children sick, and not be able to do anything because there are no medications,” a mother in the city of Mayarí told the newspaper Diario de Cuba in February. “I went to the hospital and there’s nothing to cure it either. It’s a tragedy.”

Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is spreading, many medical professionals have fled, and basic needs in hospitals, like reliable running water, are no longer met.

On July 6, Diario de Cuba quoted a Facebook post by an emergency-room nurse at the Faustino Pérez Provincial Hospital, in the capital city of the province of Matanzas: “There are no beds or stretchers, a hospital without water for more than six hours in two periods of the day.”

The same story quoted a healthcare professional at Héroes del Moncada Polyclinic in the city of Cárdenas describing on Facebook the plight of the sick: They “do not receive medical attention when they need it most or they must wait in a deteriorated state of health in long lines, and the reason is that there is not enough health personnel to cover all the fronts.”

Cuba’s claim that it graduates thousands of qualified doctors and nurses every year is suspect. Yet even if the numbers are reliable, Havana’s practice of human trafficking robs the nation of available medical professionals.

The dictatorship claims it sends tens of thousands of healthcare workers around the globe out of altruism. But the medical missions are a money-making operation. Countries pay Havana for the workers in dollars or euros and it gives only a fraction of that income to the in-country Cuban. The rest it pockets.

In the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, issued last month, Cuba gets a failing grade. The report described “a government policy or government pattern to profit from labor export programs with strong indications of forced labor, particularly its foreign medical missions program.” The report went on to say that in the past year Cuba “capitalized on the pandemic by increasing the number and size of medical missions and refused to improve the program’s transparency or address labor violations and trafficking crimes despite persistent allegations from observers, former participants, and foreign governments” of Cuban abuses.

This mistreatment includes confiscating documents and salaries and threatening workers and their families if they try to flee their assignments.

The regime’s medical-export survival strategy also creates a shortage of medications. Cuba produces pharmaceutical products but exports them for profit rather than making what is needed available to the population.

According to the Cárdenas medical worker’s Facebook post, “the reality is that there are no drugs to treat the different symptoms that Covid positive patients present.”

Yet Cuba is so eager to be recognized as a biotech pioneer that it is administering the homemade vaccine Abdala to Cubans and Venezuelans before it has cleared clinical trials or peer review and without informed consent. A June 25 bulletin from Venezuela’s National Academy of Medicine warned about the “experimental” nature of the product without “proven efficacy.”

Cuba wants the Biden administration to ease U.S. restrictions on things like travel to the island and remittances. Count on the regime to use the population’s agony as a negotiating tool.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.

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