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Cuba has sent brigades of doctors around the world for 60 years. With the Covid-19 crisis, Cuban doctors landed in much richer countries, such as Italy or the French overseas territories. The UN recognizes their work, but also criticizes the conditions in which they work, while Human Rights Watch considers them “modern slaves.” The journalist Maïlys Khider has just published ‘Cuban Doctors. The armies of peace’ and we spoke with her in this issue of Escala in Paris.
Cuba has 11 million inhabitants and 100,000 doctors. Many of them spend several months abroad. A program that already has 60 years of history and that began in 1963 in Algeria. Later they would also go to Angola, Congo, Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Liberia and Venezuela to assist in wars, crises, catastrophes, epidemics and others.
The export of health services represents the main income of foreign currency for Cuba, ahead of remittances and tourism. The island’s National Statistics Office published a report noting that the country had collected $6.4 billion in 2018.
Maïlys Khider became interested in Cuban doctors working abroad during the first lockdown in 2020. This independent French journalist, member of the ExtraMurosPress collective, read an article that surprised her about sending Cuban doctors to Italy to help treat to patients with Covid-19, which revealed the fragility of European health systems in the face of a pandemic. And it is that, even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recognizes that 62% of its 33 member countries suffer from a shortage of personnel in the health sector.
“There are many medical deserts in Europe, in rural areas, for example in France and also in Italy, that’s why they called Cuba,” he explains. The question of why a rich country asked the small communist nation for help was what motivated her to travel to the island to investigate and learn the history of those doctors. It was in 2021, coinciding with the demonstrations in July for, among other reasons, the lack of food.
There he met with several Cuban doctors who had gone to missions abroad. “There are doctors who go on an adventure when they are younger and who want to travel. And there are doctors who go on a mission to earn more money because much more money is earned abroad,” he explains at Escala in Paris.
Cuban doctors, alone against Ebola in Liberia
The role of these doctors has been very important in very tense situations, such as the one experienced in 2014 with the Ebola epidemic in Africa. An experience that is collected in the book through the testimony of Juan Jesús Alemán.
“Technically they had been prepared in Havana before going to Liberia. But one thing is the theory and then the situation upon arrival. According to what he told me, they arrived at a place where the doctors had left out of fear, that there were 100 % dead, they had to set up emergency tents and work in very difficult conditions. It was a terrible six months, but they got results,” says Khider. Some progress that was recognized even by the United States, a country that maintains the embargo on the island.
Cuba has always sold itself as a medical powerhouse. However, in July 2021 there were massive demonstrations to protest against the Government and among the complaints was the shortage of food and medicine. A contradiction for a leading country in medicine. For Khider, the explanation must be found in the consequences of the US embargo.
“This health system does not allow doctors to work as they could because they do not have material resources, they cannot import syringes, masks, respirators, machine technologies and then the situation becomes quite difficult,” he says.
Doctors who decide to desert cannot return to Cuba for eight years
Not only kindnesses are said about these brigades. The UN and Human Rights Watch refer to this system of doctors as “modern slavery,” with draconian standards of conduct that violate numerous basic doctors’ rights, leading many to defect.
“I have spoken with doctors who stayed in the country where they went on mission and who decided they did not want to return to Cuba. This situation is always analyzed in a very romantic way, or they are heroes of socialism or they are slaves of the dictatorship. For me the The situation is much less romantic. In Cuba they charge 100 euros, outside 1,000 euros. Of course there are people who want to stay because they have children in the country where they are or because they are going to charge more,” the journalist clarified.
However, she highlights two criticisms of the system: the part that remains with the State and the prohibition for deserters to return to Cuba for eight years.
