Dr. Yamila de Armas Águila, is the President of Comercializadora de Servicios Médicos Cubanos (CSMC S.A., SMC Salud). I first met with Dr. de Armas at the offices of CSMC in Miramar in 2018. In 2022, we met again at her office for a followup interview.
This is an excerpt from the interview; the full conversation will appear in the upcoming book, “The Cuba Interviews: Conversations on Foreign Investment and Economic Development.”
CSMC manages seven departments which market medical services on the Island and abroad. It handles the delivery of medical tourism, academic and postgraduate education programs, Cuba’s international medical services program (Henry Reeve Medical Brigade), well-being and quality of life programs for Cubans, medical services for foreign residents, management of the country’s network of pharmacies and optical services, and the organization of health science congresses and events.
The company maintains strategic business alliances with the Ministry of Tourism, the BioCubaFarma business group, the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER), the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Public Health, to provide specialized health services.
T.K. Hernández: Experts predict the global market size of health tourism will expand in the coming years after the impacts of the pandemic. Can you provide Cuba’s medical tourism stats for the last five years, countries of origin, services, number of visitors?
Dr. Yamila de Armas: Indeed, everything predicts that after the crisis generated by the pandemic, health and quality of life will be highly valued by individuals and families. Some have even said that it is the new luxury, after the years of social isolation and loss of human lives. The perception and weight people place on their health is undoubtedly important. This could generate a greater demand for these services and even the selection of tourist destinations is highly conditioned by their general safety and health safety and proven response capacity for the contingencies experienced and those that may continue to occur. People need to travel safely, and this lesson has been well learned. The coverage of vaccinated populations, including children, is one of these indicators that becomes an attribute in tourist destinations, as well as evidence of the robustness of the health system and its preventive vision.
It is up to those of us who offer services to adjust in correspondence to this scenario, which is sufficient for the populations that have emerged from the pandemic and are seeking alternatives to live longer and better, and for us as providers to ratify our commitment to life.
Regarding health tourism statistics, we begin by saying that they result from these two years in totally abnormal conditions of closed borders and total depression of the tourism sector, from which health tourism and its components, medical tourism, and quality of life tourism, do not escape. The fundamental causes are related precisely to the health, economic and social phenomena. In our case, it has also allowed us to enter a process of revision and adjustment in the way of collecting the primary data. This allows us to separate, with greater precision, medical tourism itself, from the medical attention to tourism and these two, from the quality-of-life services. These adjustments will allow the best comparability with international statistics, so the data published this year will have the results of this improvement.
