The Pentagon’s Africa Command said on Tuesday that it was investigating claims by the jihadist terrorist organization al-Shabaab that an American drone strike targeting its members killed two Cuban slave doctors whom the jihadists had abducted in 2019.
The two men, surgeon Landy Rodríguez Hernández and general practitioner Assel Herrera Correa, disappeared in April 2019 after unidentified gunmen attacked their vehicle on their way to work at Mandera Hospital in the eponymous Kenyan city. A month later, Kenyan elders reached out to al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia and reported that the men were in their custody, being forced to offer the terrorist group medical care. Al-Shabaab, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, demanded $1.5 million to free the doctors, but neither Kenya nor Cuba paid the ransom and the men have never been heard from again.
The Cuban government has intermittently claimed efforts to rescue the doctors, but no evidence suggests any substantial efforts on the part of the Communist Party beyond occasional mentions of the doctors to Kenyan diplomats. The anti-communist publication Diario de Cuba noted in its coverage of the al-Shabaab announcement this weekend that the most recent direct action the Cuban government took regarding the doctors, at least publicly, appears to be Díaz-Canel mentioning their captivity during a meeting with former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2021.
Rodríguez and Herrera are slave doctors, used by the Cuban Communist Party to elevate the nation’s profile and sold at a high price to receiving countries. Estimates suggest that the impoverished Cuban state makes as much as $11 billion a year on medical slavery. Slave doctors are forced into grueling work schedules in some of the host countries’ most dangerous areas, contracts that dramatically limit their interactions with locals, and onerous punishments for anyone seeking to leave the program. Most do not receive a living wage, but rather a meager “stipend” that survivors have said is not enough to survive. A Cuban slave doctor who chooses to abandon the program faces an eight-year ban from returning to the island and a ban on interacting with their family in any way.
The Organization of American States (OAS) declared Cuba’s slave doctor program a form of human trafficking in 2019.
Al-Shabaab announced the alleged deaths of the two doctors on Saturday.
“The aerial bombardment which began at around 12:10 a.m. targeted a house in Jilib, instantly killing Assel Herrera and Landy Rodriguez who were captured on April 12, 2019,” the statement, reportedly in English, read in part. Jilib is a town in Somalia. Voice of America reported that the statement was accompanied by what appeared to be a photograph of a corpse; commenters on what appears to be Herrera’s long-abandoned Facebook page posted some graphic images of the doctors on his profile on Sunday.
The terrorists also used the statement to scold the American government for its alleged “recklessness.”
“Thursday morning’s drone strikes against the Cuban prisoners once again sheds light on the recklessness and desperate nature of AFRICOM’s operations in Somalia,” the statement read in part, “as well as the incompetence of the American crusaders and their faulty intelligence apparatus that has led to the murder of the two hostages.”
Cuba’s figurehead “president,” Miguel Díaz-Canel, responded to the message on Monday by insisting that the reports were unconfirmed.
“I express all my solidarity and affection to the families of our doctors Assel and Landy in these moments of uncertainty and increased pain,” the Castro regime puppet said, “in the face of the tragic news that has not yet been confirmed. We are working hard to clarify this with international authorities.”
The leader of Cuba’s rubber-stamp legislature, Esteban Lazo, reportedly began a trip to Kenya on Tuesday to “conduct urgent actions with the highest authorities of that country seeking cooperation and clarification,” Cuba’s Foreign Relations Ministry announced, “regarding the recent news published regarding the possible unconfirmed deaths of doctors Assel Herrera Correa and Landy Rodríguez.”
U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which al-Shabaab blamed for the alleged deaths, confirmed on Tuesday that American forces had indeed engaged in airstrikes in the respective area, but that it could not confirm the presence of the Cuban doctors at the site of the strike. The U.S. government routinely engages in operations in the region to aid the Somali government against Islamist terrorists, primarily al-Shabaab.
“We do not have further information at this time about these reports, but we do take all claims of civilian casualties seriously,” AFRICOM said in a statement. “The command will continue to assess the results of this operation and will provide additional information as available.”
The government of Kenya has not at press time issued any comment on the reports surrounding the Cuban doctors.
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