Outgoing Mexican far-left President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is expediting the hiring of 5,223 Cuban slave doctors one month before the end of his presidency, Martí Noticias reported on Tuesday.
López Obrador, who took office in 2018, will conclude his six-year term on October 1. The outgoing president, commonly referred to by his initials, AMLO, will be succeeded on that date by his protegé, Claudia Sheinbaum, a 62-year-old far-left politician, scientist, and academic, who was elected as Mexico’s next president in June.
Martí Noticias, a U.S-based outlet that focuses on Cuba, stated in its report that López Obrador is accelerating the arrival of more Cuban slave doctors to Mexico before he leaves office through agreements signed with Cuba’s communist Castro regime, which have resulted in the arrival of hundreds of Cuban doctors to the country in recent years.
According to statements given by a Mexican government source to the Cuban independent media outlet 14 y Medio, the goal is to have 5,223 Cuban slave doctors in Mexico “as soon as possible.” The slave doctors are reportedly arriving at Mexico’s Felipe Ángeles International Airport in groups of 200. 14 y Medio stated that some 800 Cuban slave doctors arrived in Mexico across four groups throughout August.
“The López Obrador administration ends in October and the plans are to have almost all of them,” the source reportedly said. “However, the incorporation into the hospitals will take time because an introductory talk is required, in addition to confirmation of documents, in order to be able to attend in the office [clinic].”
Cuban ambassador to Mexico Marcos Rodríguez Costa published pictures of the arrival of 192 Cuban slave doctors to the country on Friday.
“Solidarity and cooperation are principles of the historic ties that unite our peoples,” Rodríguez Costa’s message reads.
President-elect Sheinbaum expressed her willingness to have Mexico continue the Cuban slave doctor deal with the Castro regime once she takes office in remarks given after meeting with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla in July:
[We met] with the Cuban Foreign Minister, they know that Cuba is a sister nation and we talked, for example, about the support they are giving us with Cuban doctors, to be able to maintain it for next year and about some other important issues of the Mexico-Cuba relationship.
The Castro regime, which has pushed Cuba to the brink of near-complete ruin through more than six decades of communist mismanagement, has spent extensive decades-long efforts to style itself as a global healthcare leader. The healthcare powerhouse image that the Cuban regime falsely projects to the international community heavily contrasts with the ruined state of Cuba’s healthcare system and infrastructure.
Cuba’s “medical missions,” which consist of the Castro regime selling the nation’s doctors into forced slave labor to other countries around the world, is one of the main sources of income for the communist regime, which pockets nearly all of the money received from the multi-million dollar deals signed with other countries while only paying a small fraction to the slave doctors. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal estimated that the Castro regime makes $11 billion a year on the health worker slave trade.
While several international organizations — such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) — have denounced the Castro regime for subjecting the doctors to slave labor and other human rights abuses, countries such as Mexico, Qatar, and the local government of Calabria, Italy, continue to sign agreements with Cuba in exchange for the doctors’ slave labor.
Reports published in January indicated that Mexico paid Cuba $10,700 per slave doctor specialist for three months of their work during the height of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic — of which the Castro regime pocketed 94.4 percent of the salary of each doctor, who denounced that they were only paid a total of $600 for their labor. Mexico reportedly paid $6.25 million to Cuba at the time for the work of 585 Cuban slave doctors and nurses during the pandemic.
The Castro regime threates Cuban slave doctors with imprisonment and other severe legal consequences if they defect from the program or violate the restrictive rules imposed on them that prevent them from driving to other places without authorization, befriending locals, or leaving their residence.
Cuban doctors who attempt to defect are punished with an eight-year ban from entering Cuba — which often leaves them unable to be present for their children’s childhoods. Doctors who have successfully defected from the program denounced that the regime not only abuses them but forces them to falsify medical data to make Cuba appear more successful in providing health care than it actually is. Some doctors have testified to being forced to destroy medicine and claim to have administered it to patients who did not exist, increasing the number of patients those doctors “treated.”