Cuba’s health care system, long a source of national pride, is in acute distress, particularly in distant provinces.

After fending off the coronavirus last year, Cuba has been ravaged this summer by the highly contagious Delta variant, which has sent case rates soaring and swamped the country’s medical system.

More than 8,600 new cases were reported on Tuesday, about six times as many as the number of new cases just two months ago, according to Ministry of Health figures.

Oxygen supplies for Covid-19 patients are running low, and the factory that produces the nation’s canisters is currently shut down.

Mortuaries and crematories have been overwhelmed. The city of Guantánamo, for example, is dealing with a surge of deaths that on some days climbs to about eight times the usual number, a government official said. Cubans are posting heart-wrenching videos of dead relatives, saying that their loved ones died for lack of medical care.

This past weekend, after Cuba’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, said that Cubans were complaining more about doctors and their poor service than they were about the shortages, nearly two dozen young physicians and medical students took to social media to state, one by one: “I am publicly declaring that doctors are not to blame for the collapse of the public health system.”

The move was a daring step in Cuba, where any public show of discontent may result in the loss of employment or even prison.

Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, acknowledged recently that the pandemic had “exceeded the capacity” of the Cuban health care system, but he blamed the U.S. trade embargo for the shortages the country suffers.

While the pandemic has strained medical systems around the world, the calamity in Cuba is particularly significant because the government has for decades held its free health care system up as a signal accomplishment of the socialist revolution. But the growing crisis has revealed a frayed system that, while often producing medical breakthroughs, is also denounced as ill-equipped and underfunded.

The Cuban Ministry of Health did not respond to several requests for comment.

Alexander J. Figueredo Izaguirre, a doctor in the Cuban province of Granma, said he was fired this year after he criticized the poor state of the country’s hospitals following the death of his grandfather.

“The funeral homes can’t cope, the hospitals can’t cope, the clinics can’t cope,” he said. “We have been struggling for a year and a half in this battle against this disease — without weapons — when hundreds and thousands of people are dying.”

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