PETITION
Say NO to US Assault on Cuba’s Medical Missions
Image by Soonha Jo.
The UN General Assembly’s August 25 session on global health and foreign policy heard from Cuban Ambassador Yuri Gala López. Cuba’s top UN official mentioned that, “we have helped to prepare tens of thousands of doctors from various countries of the Global South.” He denounced U.S. inclusion of Cuba on its list of State Sponsors of Terrorism and then turned to “the slanderous U.S. campaign directed at our medical services.”
“Selfishness must be banished from international relations, and unilateral coercive measures that negatively impact the enjoyment of the right to health must be eliminated,” he insisted. But his generalities leave unsaid the anti-human, cruel, and cynical nature of a new mode of U.S. attack on Cuba. Now the U.S. indicts Cuba for taking healthcare to the world, for practicing international solidarity.
We urge readers to sign a petition demanding that the current U.S. assault on Cuba’s medical missions stop. The Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network and the US-Cuba Normalization Conference Coalition collaborated in presenting the petition.
It calls upon the U.S. government to end “the U.S. slander campaign against Cuba’s medical brigades” and remove “visa restrictions on countries that contract with the brigades for much-needed healthcare services.” The petition with its signatures will be delivered to elected officials of the U.S. government and to delegations of the various countries belonging to the UN General Assembly.
What follows here is advocacy in the form of basic information about Cuba’s international medical solidarity and about U.S. anti-Cuban hostility that would bring down even the most beneficent of human undertakings. The report concludes with a link allowing readers to sign the petition.
From the time of Cuban national hero José Martí (1853-1895), Cuba’s Revolution has attended to the aspirations of oppressed peoples everywhere. With the victory of the Revolution in 1959, allowance for decent healthcare emerged as a foremost goal, and not solely for Cubans.
Speaking in October 1962, Fidel Castro declared that, “With a view to the future, … the definitive solution is the mass training of doctors. And the Revolution has strength today … to begin a training plan for doctors in the quantities that are necessary. And not only many, but above all good ones; and not only good as doctors. but good as men and as women, as patriots and as revolutionaries!”
By 2022, Cuba had sent 605,698 healthcare workers of all sorts to 165 countries.
The U.S. government announced on February 17 that, “current or former Cuban government officials, and other individuals, including foreign government officials … [and] the immediate family of such persons” will no longer be receiving visas for travel to the United States. The policy “targets forced labor linked to the Cuban labor export program [involving] Cuba’s overseas medical missions.” It applies to officials of the various countries who make arrangements for the visiting Cuban doctors and other healthcare workers.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on June 3 announced visa restrictions imposed on unnamed officials in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador who are somehow linked to the Cuban doctors. On August 13, the State Department identified officials of Brazil, Grenada, and several African countries would not be receiving visas.
U.S. officials justify the new policy as the U.S. response to the Cuban government’s exploitation of Cuban healthcare workers, which is cast as “human trafficking.” The U.S. itself, of course, has its own record replete with actions taken at home and abroad leading to oppression of already marginalized and needy populations.
The Cuban doctors and nurses working abroad receive a stipend from host governments that cover living expenses. Families in Cuba have access to their regular pay, plus a bonus for overseas service.
The fabricated charge of forced labor becomes a U.S. tool for solidifying its economic blockade of Cuba. The medical missions are vulnerable to sanctions because they produce income for Cuba’s government, the object of U.S. wrath. The yield in 2018, for example, was $6.4 billion.
Cuba uses funds derived from the medical missions to help pay for Cuba’s own healthcare system. The U.S. attack on the medical missions is not new; between 2006 and 2017, the U.S. government offered inducements for the Cuban doctors to abandon their posts and move to the United States. Fewer than 2% did so.
Notable examples of countries paying for medical services under Cuban auspices include: Brazil, where some 8500 Cuban healthcare workers served during the Delma Rousseff presidency; Italy, host to 370 Cubans serving now in Calabria; Mexico, having welcomed 3100 additional Cuban physicians in 2024; France, concerned about medical care for its colony Martinique; Saudi Arabia, workplace for 600 Cuban doctors from 2014 on; and Qatar, employer of 52 doctors and 292 nurses from Cuba during the Covid era.
Not only do medical missions provide income for Cuba’s government, but they also cost. Scholar Helen Yaffee indicates that 27 of the 62 countries hosting Cuban doctors in 2017 paid nothing for care received from Cuban providers.
Cuba’s medical internationalism is of heroic proportions. Cuban healthcare workers were confronting the deadly Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014-2016. At least 42 countries called upon them to treat Covid-19 patients. After a terrible earthquake, they were saving lives in Pakistan’s mountains in winter 2005. They cared for the afflicted in Haiti after the giant 2010 earthquake there.
Around the globe, Cuba’s brigades of emergency health workers have been present relieving suffering associated with epidemics, floods hurricanes, and earthquakes; 13,467 of them have served in 56 countries since 2005.
Reviewing the scandalous U.S. treatment of Cuba’s medical missions, Hernando Calvo Ospina, a Colombian journalist living in France, noted recently that, “Where the United States and Europe sends troops, Cuba sends doctors,” also that, “To date, no government, private entity, or international organization has managed to structure a global medical program that provides an effective, large-scale response to people in need the way Cuba does.”
This report turns to readers: if the information offered here leads you to a negative view of the U.S. assault on Cuba’s medical internationalism, you might now weigh in and say NO. You can do exactly that by adding your name to the petition noted above. Click here to register your NO vote:
