Students from the entire world, inchuding the US, have been educated in Cuba

[Judi Lynn]

2. Cuba Sends Doctors, the US Sends Sanctions

By
Helen Yaffe

The United States calls Cuba’s medical internationalism "human trafficking" — but it’s really an internationalist lifeline for the Global South.

On February 25, US secretary of state Marco Rubio announced restrictions on visas for both government officials in Cuba and any others worldwide who are “complicit” with the island nation’s overseas medical-assistance programs. A US State Department statement clarified that the sanction extends to “current and former” officials and the “immediate family of such persons.” This action, the seventh measure targeting Cuba in one month, has international consequences; for decades tens of thousands of Cuban medical professionals have been posted in around sixty countries, far more than the World Health Organization’s (WHO) workforce, mostly working in under- or unserved populations in the Global South. By threatening to withhold visas from foreign officials, the US government means to sabotage these Cuban medical missions overseas. If it works, millions will suffer.

Rubio built his career around taking a hard line on Cuban socialism, even alleging that his parents fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba until the Washington Post revealed that they migrated to Miami in 1956 during the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. As Trump’s secretary of state, Rubio is in prime position to ramp up the belligerent US-Cuba policy first laid out in April 1960 by deputy assistant secretary of state Lester Mallory: to use economic warfare against revolutionary Cuba to bring about “hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Cuba stands accused by the US government of human trafficking, even equating overseas Cuban medical personnel to slaves. Rubio’s tweet parroted this pretext. The real objective is to undermine both Cuba’s international prestige and the revenue it receives from exporting medical services. Since 2004, earnings from Cuban medical and professional services exports have been the island’s greatest source of income. Cuba’s ability to conduct “normal” international trade is currently obstructed by the long US blockade, but the socialist state has succeeded in converting its investments in education and health care into national earnings, while also maintaining free medical assistance to the Global South based on its internationalist principles.

The four approaches of Cuban medical internationalism were initiated early in the 1960s, all despite the post-1959 departure of half of the physicians in Cuba.

1. Emergency response medical brigades. In May 1960, Chile was struck by the most powerful earthquake on record, with thousands killed. The new Cuban government sent an emergency medical brigade with six rural field hospitals. This established a modus operandi under which Cuban medics mobilize rapid responses to “disaster and disease” emergencies throughout the Global South — since 2005 these brigades have been organized under the name “Henry Reeve International Contingents.” By 2017, when the WHO praised the Henry Reeve brigades with a public health prize, they had helped 3.5 million people in twenty-one countries. The best-known examples include brigades in West Africa to combat Ebola in 2014 and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Within one year, Henry Reeve brigades treated 1.26 million coronavirus patients in forty countries, including in Western Europe.

2. Establishment of public health care apparatuses abroad. Starting in 1963, Cuban medics helped establish a public health care system in newly independent Algeria. By the 1970s, they had set up and staffed Comprehensive Health Programs all throughout Africa. By 2014, 76,000 Cuban medical personnel had worked in thirty-nine African countries. In 1998, a Cuban cooperation agreement with Haiti committed to send 300 to 500 Cuban medical professionals there all while training Haitian doctors back in Cuba. By December 2021, more than 6,000 Cubans medical professionals had saved 429,000 lives in the poorest country in the western hemisphere, conducting 36 million consultations. And for two decades now, Cuba has maintained over 20,000 medics in Venezuela, peaking at 29,000. In 2013, the Pan American Health Organization contracted 11,400 Cuban doctors to work in under- and unserved regions of Brazil. By 2015, Cuban Integral Healthcare Programs were operating in forty-three countries.

3. Treating foreign patients in Cuba. In 1961, children and wounded fighters from Algeria’s war for independence from France went to Cuba for treatment. Thousands followed from around the world. Two programs were developed to treat foreign patients en masse: The first is the “Children of Chernobyl” program which began in 1990 and lasted for twenty-one years, during which 26,000 people affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster received free medical treatment and rehabilitation on the island — nearly 22,000 of them children. The Cubans covered the cost, despite the program coinciding with Cuba’s severe economic crisis, known as the Special Period, following the collapse of the socialist bloc. The second program to treat foreign patients en masse was Operation Miracle, set up in 2004 for Venezuelans with reversible blindness to get free eye operations in Cuba to restore their sight. It subsequently expanded regionally. By 2017, Cuba was running sixty-nine ophthalmology clinics in fifteen countries under Operation Miracle, and by early 2019 over four million people in thirty-four countries had benefited.

4. Medical training for foreigners, both in Cuba and overseas. It’s important to note that the Cuban state never sought to foster dependence. In the 1960s, it began training foreigners in their own countries when suitable facilities were available, or in Cuba when they were not. By 2016, 73,848 foreign students from eighty-five countries had graduated in Cuba while that nation was running twelve medical schools overseas, mostly in Africa, where over 54,000 students were enrolled. In 1999, the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), the world’s largest medical school, was established in Havana. By 2019, ELAM had graduated 29,000 doctors from 105 countries (including the United States) representing 100 ethnic groups. Half were women, and 75 percent from worker or campesino families.

More:
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/cuba-medical-programs-us-sanctions