Image: Endrys Correa Vaillant
Three U.S. Senators, obsessed with starving Cuba, have introduced a bill that seeks to punish countries that accept the island's medical collaboration.
All three, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, have a long history of service to the most U.S. hostile policies toward Cuba, and not one of them is interested in how many people our doctors save or help.
The bill directs the State Department to publish a list of countries that have contracts with the Cuban government to provide medical services, and requires that this be considered as a factor in the classification of such nations in the U.S. report on human trafficking.
The spite of these politicians seems to know no bounds. Not even in the current situation, when medical services, of any origin, are most needed, do these fanatics stop their attacks on a cooperative effort that has saved millions of lives and contributes to the development of human resource training programs in countries where their lack is reflected in the population’s poor health, with treatable diseases proliferating and the consequent mortality rates.
These gentlemen know well, but are not interested in what is happening today in places where our professionals are no longer present, such as Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, which, under pressure from the United States, ended their medical collaboration agreements, leaving inhabitants of remote regions and poor neighborhoods without health or hope.
They are too busy sanctioning grateful nations that receive Cuban doctors, to stop to consider why the richest country in the world has become the epicenter of the pandemic.
Editor's Note
The US DHS definition of "human trafficking": Human trafficking is modern-day slavery and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act." has zero to do with medical care. The senators' implication is that the Cuban doctors are being forced, unwillingly, to go to other countries to provide medical care. This is patently absurd to anyone with the most basic knowledge of Cuba's medical school programs. (See here, here, here and here.) Rubio and Cruz see the world in two colors: Us and them. "Them" is anyone the US cannot outright control, especially, as in Cuba's case, despite trying really hard for 61 years.
