A group of Cuban activists and health professionals criticized the communist Castro regime’s plans to send an additional 119 Cuban slave doctors to Mexico, at a time when the nation’s precarious and understaffed healthcare system faces its worst crisis in more than six decades of communist rule.
The government of far-left Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador will receive an additional 119 Cuban doctors in January 2023. The 119 slave doctors will join the existing pool of 491 to complete the total of 610 Cuban doctors sent to Mexico as agreed in July 2022 between Mexico’s health authorities and the Cuban Medical Services Marketer (CSMC), the communist regime’s organization that manages the Cuban slave doctor trade.
Cuban doctors working under these arrangements have described themselves as “slaves” because they receive minimal pay and have very little control over their medical careers — they are simply exported as a commodity, like bags of sugar.
According to reports published in August, Mexico is allegedly paying Cuba more than $1 million per month for the doctors’ slave labor for a period of 12 months.
Eduardo Cardet, Cuban doctor and head of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) Cuban dissident political party told Radio Television Marti on Wednesday that the shipping of more Cuban doctors will reduce Cuba’s capacity to offer healthcare services.
“The Cuban health system is in a degree of deterioration that increasingly accrues more deficit not only of personnel, but of supplies,” Cardet said. “Unfortunately, the regime treats this as a business, it is no secret to anyone that the dividends it obtains from the export of professional and health services in general are very juicy.”
According to the Castro regime, the slave doctors trade has consistently been their highest source of revenue for the communist regime throughout the years. By 2020, it was estimated that the communist regime was earning upwards of $11 billion per year from the controlled labor of the nation’s healthcare professionals.
The Castro regime pockets virtually all of the revenue from the slave doctor trade, paying the doctors meager wages. In 2020, Cuban slave doctors in Venezuela complained they were being paid only $4 per month.
“The resources that the regime is supposedly going to capture from the export of these medical services, as we have been observing over time, are not going to be reinvested in improving the living conditions of the Cuban people or in the system hospital, polyclinics and health in general,” Cardet continued.
The Castro regime, aided by international leftist media, ideologically aligned politicians, and its slave doctor program, has sold its tightly controlled healthcare system as a flawless and world-leading. In reality, the Cuban healthcare system is in shambles, much like the rest of the nation, as a result of over six decades of communist rule.
Cuba has been facing severe medicine shortages for the past few years. In July 2022, reports indicated that the shortages of basic medicine, which include treatments for asthma, lung conditions, and hypertension, reached nearly 40 percent. Shortages of basic supplies, such as plaster casts for treatment of fractures, have forced Cuban doctors to employ pieces of cardboard instead.
Havana-based historian and journalist Boris González Arena told Radio Television Marti that the experienced doctors that are shipped abroad for the slave labor ‘missions’ are hastily replaced by recently graduated doctors.
“The Cuban health system needs a lot of human capital, because since it does not have diagnostic technology or medicines, it needs, at least, a good doctor,” González Arena said.
The Organization of American States (OAS) denounced the Cuban slave-doctor program as ‘human trafficking’ in 2019. Doctors that are sent abroad by the communist regime are stripped of their passports, placed under severely strict curfews and constant surveillance, and are not allowed from driving unless authorized or even befriending locals.
Those that manage to defect from the communist regime’s slave labor program are banned from entering Cuba for a period of eight years — which can force the defecting doctors to miss their children growing up.
Cuban human rights organization Prisoner Defenders published a report on December 12 where the organization directly accused the regional government of Calabria, Italy, Qatar, and Mexico of supporting the Castro regime’s slave doctor trade.
The government of the Italian region of Calabria announced on Wednesday the arrival of 50 Cuban slave doctors to the region as part of an agreement signed by Calabria’s local governor, Roberto Occhiuto with the Castro regime in August 2022.
“They tried to stop us, with controversy and bureaucratic obstacles, but we succeeded,” Occhiuto said on Wednesday via his Facebook account. “As I have said on several occasions, they are not going to steal any job from Italian doctors, but they will help us keep the wards and hospitals open.”
In 2020, the Castro regime had sent a delegation of slave doctors to Italy to ‘help’ the European nation deal with the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
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