Dr. Fermin Leguen still dreams about Cuba.
The Southern Nevada Health District’s chief health officer grew up in Havana as the son of a taxi driver. Raised during a period of political volatility and heightened political surveillance, Leguen eventually left the island nation in search of better opportunities and, with the help of an uncle, obtained a visa, finding work as a technician at a Miami hospital.
Just a few years later, he was accepted into Johns Hopkins University, where he completed a master’s degree in public health.
Since leaving home, he has lived everywhere from Ethiopia (where he helped lead cholera immunization efforts) to Spain. But now that he is set to retire in February, his heart is set on where it all began.
“I guess I dream about Cuba every single day at this point,” he reflected.
Leguen originally joined the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) in 2016 as director of clinical services. During his tenure, he shepherded the agency through the COVID-19 pandemic and many other public health challenges, including outbreaks of the West Nile virus and the opioid epidemic. In the fall of 2019, he was promoted to the agency’s top position, chief health officer.
But many note that one of Leguen’s biggest impacts was increasing outreach to Southern Nevada’s Hispanic population.
Las Vegas City Councilwoman Olivia Diaz, who served on the SNHD Board, became acquainted with Leguen when he first joined SNHD. She was quickly struck by his “calm and steady” disposition and says that for her, Leguen “exemplifies resiliency.” As a Latina, Diaz saw that Leguen truly understood the multigenerational nature of Latino households and how to connect with the community.
In particular, Diaz points to Leguen’s ability to communicate in English and Spanish.
His bilingualism, she said, took on particular importance during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected Nevada’s Hispanic community, with Latinos accounting for about 22 percent of Nevada’s COVID-19 related deaths. Under his leadership, SNHD launched an educational campaign around COVID in 2020, creating bilingual public service announcements and mask distribution events.
“He caught on quickly that in order to better serve our community, we need to have a more bilingual staff,” Diaz said. “So he is definitely someone who helped us grow our health district to match the demographics that we serve here in Southern Nevada.”
Leguen previously worked in Miami and Peru, areas with a high Latino population, and he contends that his background has helped him connect with Las Vegas’ Hispanic community and other minority groups — something that he said that SNHD has struggled with. Under his leadership, Leguen says that SNHD has upped the number of Spanish-speaking employees and partnered with the Mexican and El Salvador consulates to deliver public health services and resources.
“To be able to somehow resemble the social composition of the community that we serve, we take that very seriously,” Leguen said.
But Leguen’s work isn’t limited to just the Hispanic community. In addition to SNHD’s partnerships with several Hispanic Catholic charities, the agency has partnered with the African Community Center, a branch of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, a nonprofit organization geared toward refugees and immigrants.
Overall, Leguen said he remains proud of the district’s response to the pandemic. The district remained highly dependent on the federal and state governments for vaccine delivery and funding, but he felt that the SNHD was able to maximize immunization efforts with the resources it received.
State Sen. Fabian Doñate (D-Las Vegas), who chairs the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and has worked on public health proposals including to expand Medicaid access to undocumented Nevadans, said that Leguen played an instrumental role in saving people’s lives during the pandemic. Doñate thinks that as Latino, Leguen was able to provide an additional perspective that ended up being crucial in organizing outreach efforts — “not only looking like us, but also understanding our background.”
Leguen says there isn’t much he would change in the SNHD’s response. Now, four years later, he contends that SNHD is much better equipped to handle another pandemic if one were to hit. The pandemic created a “very strong bond” between SNHD, community organizations and private entities that continue to serve them.
“We were highly dependent on the state policies regarding the operation of the vaccination delivery, so perhaps there were some things that I would have loved to do differently if I had that power, but certainly many of the things we couldn’t change,” Leguen reflected.
Before his stint wraps up, Leguen and his team have several plans in the works, including completing an annex to their public health lab and building a behavioral health center planned to be completed in December, just a few months before his retirement.
Leguen says that he has no specific professional plans in the future, just to spend more time with his family.
“I think we’ve been better off because we’ve had someone like Dr. Leguen in our city,” Diaz said.
