Mexico’s populist government claims to protect the oppressed, but it has silently invited at least 590 Cuban health workers to Mexico City despite United Nations and human-rights groups’ assessments that Cuba’s medical missions abroad may amount to slave labor.
To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with Mexico inviting foreign doctors to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. And there would be nothing wrong with Mexico inviting Cuban doctors, if it were done transparently and within international human-rights standards. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Between 590 and 800 Cuban doctors have arrived in Mexico City in recent weeks, according to a report quoting the Spanish news agency EFE’s government sources. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s government has given few details about the Cuban doctors’ arrival.
“We have a health cooperation agreement with Cuba for some time now, particularly now that we need it to face the pandemic, several Cuban physicians are in the city, in different hospitals, (as well as) nurses,” Mexico City’s government-backed mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said on May 15.
The doctors’ gradual arrival has coincided with the arrival of a 20-member Cuban medical brigade in Honduras, and with Argentina’s announcement that it plans to bring in at least 200 Cuban doctors to help fight the pandemic.
In November, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons said in a letter to Cuban authorities that the island’s medical missions abroad “could amount to forced labor.”
Cuban doctors abroad only get about 20 percent of their wages, while about 75 percent goes to the Cuban dictatorship, and 5 percent to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO,) which has shamefully brokered several host countries’ medical cooperation agreements with Cuba.
What’s just as alarming, many of the so-called “Cuban doctors” abroad are not even doctors. Bolivia’s interim government said in March that of the 702 Cuban medical workers deployed in the country until recently, only 202 were medical doctors.
In recent days, I talked with two former members of Cuba’s medical missions abroad. Like many others, they had enrolled because the pay was much better than in Cuba.
While doctors in Cuba make only between $20 and $40 a month, the Brazilian government used to pay Cuba $3,400 a month per doctor, of which the Cuban doctors were allowed to keep up to $790 a month.
Dr. Fidel Cruz, who served in Venezuela and Brazil until he defected in 2016, told me that as soon as he arrived in Venezuela, his passport was taken away at the airport. His minders from the Cuban government didn’t let him leave home after 6 p.m. or invite Venezuelans to his place, he told me.
At election time, Cuban doctors were asked to campaign for Hugo Chávez, and later for Nicolás Maduro.
”We were specifically asked to pick up people at their homes, and to take them to the voting places,” Cruz told me. “And when we saw patients, we had to tell them that ‘if you don’t vote for Maduro, we may have to leave the country next month, and you’ll be left without our medical services.”
Dr. Rossella Rivero, who also defected in Brazil in 2016, told me that when Cuban doctors desert, their families back home often suffer retaliations. She said that one of her children, also a physician, was demoted from his job as a practicing doctor and forced to fumigate homes against dengue-fever mosquitoes for two years.
Granted, Mexico may need foreign doctors. But it should hire them directly and individually, not as if they were owned by the Cuban regime.
And Lopez Obrador, who claims to be a crusader against corruption, should disclose how much Mexico is paying Cuba for these missions. If Mexico pays Cuba the $3,400 a month per physician that Brazil paid, it would be paying four times more than it pays most Mexican doctors.
If he is not transparent about Mexico’s deal with Cuba, we may be looking at a shady political giveaway of tens of millions of dollars to the island, on top of a violation of international human-rights and labor conventions.
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