Bret Stephens’s “Dr. Berwick and That Fabulous Cuban Health Care” (Global View, July 13) makes me nod in agreement. In 2006 I visited Cuba with a group from my synagogue. Our mission was to connect with small pockets of Cuban Jews in Havana. After dinner I slipped while walking down the curved marble stairs, hit my head and fell unconscious. When I woke I was covered with blood. Two Cubans lifted me up, put me in one of those 1950s cars, and drove me to the nearest hospital.

Most tourists who become ill are taken to special tourist-only facilities. But the nearest hospital to the restaurant where I fell, was for ordinary Cubans, and this is where I was treated. When we arrived I was very cold, so I asked for a blanket. There were no blankets. My hands were swollen and I needed ice. The hospital had no ice. After enduring a 20-minute electrical blackout, my head and right hand were X-rayed. One of the doctors stitched my head up as I lay on a metal gurney. On the next gurney other doctors were stitching up someone who had been knifed in the stomach. There was no curtain to separate us.

The hospital didn’t have any antibiotics. To get them, I was driven to the apartment of someone whose job was to distribute them. I returned to my hotel in my blood-soaked clothes. I didn’t have anything to change into because I didn’t get my luggage until the day our group left Cuba, eight days later.

I get angry when people (with no firsthand knowledge of the way real Cubans have to live) laud the current Cuban health-care system. The doctors and nurses were very nice to me, and they tried to make me comfortable with whatever they had. But their hands were tied because they lack modern equipment and ordinary hospital supplies. These are things people like Michael Moore and other pro-Castro lackeys never get to see.

Gail Weiss

North Potomac, Md.