Reports: Venezuela Arrests 17 Cuban Slave Doctors Trying to Flee to Colombia

Cuban doctors in exile and human rights organizations revealed this week that socialist Venezuela arrested at least 17 Cuban slave doctors for trying to escape their medical delegation.

According to the doctors, their colleagues were arrested in western Táchira state on May 10 as they tried to cross the border into Colombia.

The announcement of the arrest was made on Tuesday by members of the Gremio Médico Cubano Libre (GMLC), an NGO that seeks to defend the rights of Cuban doctors and their families, both inside and outside of Cuba.

Emilio Arteaga Pérez, a Cuban doctor living in Spain, warned about the arrest of the doctors on behalf of the GMLC through social media:

“There are 17 medical collaborators imprisoned by the Cuban government and the Venezuelan state’s security organs in the Táchira state who intended to go to Colombia after having abandoned the Venezuela ‘medical mission’,” read a post made by Miguel Angel Ruano Sanchez, another Cuban doctor currently living in Colombia.

In a phone interview given to the Colombian newspaper La Opinion on Tuesday, Ruano stated that at least six of the 17 doctors have already been deported back to Havana. The doctors who tried to flee reportedly were working in the Venezuelan states of Carabobo and Anzoátegui and attempted to cross the border to Colombia through the formal roads, as they did not had the financial resources to pay for safe passage through one of the many illegal and dangerous roads that exist between both countries, which are colloquially known as trochas.

According to an anonymous source consulted by the independent website Cubanet, the detainees will be sent to Cuba under “Code Red,” which means that they will be arrested, stripped of their medical titles, and will have to reimburse all of their travel expenses back to the communist regime, such as passport fees, lodging, medical attention, and travel expenses.

Furthermore, the source indicated that the Cuban authorities who oversee the medical delegation in Venezuela proceeded to seize the passports of the remaining doctors in retaliation — a coercitive move to prevent any other doctor from fleeing by hindering their right to identity.

The 17 doctors will be among the first to be prosecuted under Cuba’s brand new penal code, which harshly increases the punishment to anyone who dares to dissent, criticize, or defect from the communist regime. Article 176.1 of the yet-to-be-published new penal code reportedly states that any Cuban public official or employee part of an international delegation that refuses to return or abandons the delegation will face up to eight years in prison. Those who successfully defect are banned from entering Cuba for the same amount of time, eight years, often meaning that they miss out on most of their children’s childhoods.

The tale of Cuba’s “internationalist” doctors is one of modern slavery, where the real winner is the island’s communist regime. Countries like Italy have awarded and praised the Cuban regime for the labor and services provided by the slave doctors, while ignoring the plight of the doctors themselves.The Cuban regime receives approximately $11 billion per year in exchange for the slave labor the nation’s doctors are forced to do across many corners of the world — essentially funding the communist regime while the beneficiary nations turn a blind eye to the human right violations these doctors are subject to.

In the case of Venezuela, Cuba has been supplying the Venezuelan regime with slave doctors since 2003 as part of the Barrio Adentro (“Inside the Neighborhood”) health program, an agreement signed at the time signed by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and his pupil, Hugo Chávez. It was estimated that by 2011, the Cuban regime reportedly pocketed upwards of $200,000 per year for each Cuban doctor sent to Venezuela; in 2020, Cuban doctors in Venezuela denounced that they were only being paid $4 per month.

By 2020, estimates suggested that more than 22,000 Cuban slave doctors were stationed in Venezuela. In contrast, the Venezuelan Medical Federation said that by 2021, more than 40,000 Venezuelan doctors had left their country as a consequence of the low wages, harsh working conditions, and the economic and political crisis wrought upon by the collapse of socialism in Venezuela.

While the Cuban regime exports slave doctor labor across the world and receives praise from leftists for it, Cuban doctors that have managed to succesfully escape from the communist regime’s medical slave trade have shed light into the inner workings of the program. Doctors have denounced how they were forced to generate false patient reports and prescriptions while destroying medicine in order to artificially boost the program’s performance statistics.

In March 2022, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) must face a lawsuit initiated by a group of Cuban doctors that accuse the organization of financial misconduct after it allegedly profited with more than $75 million through the Mais Médicos (“More Doctors”) agreement that PAHO (a regional subsidiary of the World Health Organization) helped broker between Cuba and Brazil in 2012.

Recently, Mexican senators denounced that under the auspices of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the government of Mexico paid the Cuban regime more than 255 million Mexican Pesos ($12,940,689.00) for the services of 585 Cuban slave doctors during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic — money that the communist regime pocketed nearly in its entirety.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.