Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced plans by the Trump administration to take action against Caribbean governments and officials linked to Cuban medical brigades working in the region.
Rubio, himself of Cuban ancestry, had signaled administrative plans to expand the U.S.-Cuba visa restriction system, which has been in place for decades, to include foreign governments and officials who oversee; administer; and are linked to the large number of Cuban doctors, nurses, biomedical engineers, and others working in the 15-member Caribbean Community (Caricom). He had bizarrely described the Cuban system of sending doctors overseas as a form of human trafficking. Caribbean governments have dismissed this notion as absolute nonsense.
Rubio said administration officials think the Cubans have a system that ensures their government gets a cut of how much they earn for serving two-year stints, on average, in a particular country before having their terms extended or being rotated.
Regional governments have been reacting with indignation and arguing that any serious disruption to the program could lead to significant upheaval in the health sector. The governments have asked for an urgent meeting with Rubio or a senior U.S. official in the coming weeks to ensure clarity about a radical policy that could wreck the health sector of some of the member states. No date has been announced as yet.
As an indication of how spooked some governments are, Antiguan Prime Minister Gaston Browne made it clear in a weekend radio program that the Cuban brigade is critical to the region, and while some aspects of the program can be tweaked, no one in Caricom thinks the doctors and nurses are being trafficked.
“We totally reject [the] notion that we are involved in any form of human trafficking,” Browne declared. “The United States also must understand that these Cuban doctors and nurses represent the core of our healthcare service within the Caribbean. If we have to review the payment mechanism, that is something we can look at, but this extraterritorial positioning, articulation, and threats — I don’t know that this is the route we need to go.”
Cuban doctors have been the backbone of the health sector of many Caricom nations for at least the past four decades without any major complaints.
For leaders like Browne, the way forward is crucial because “if they were to take any punitive action against Caribbean countries because of the involvement of Cubans who are providing healthcare services, they will literally dismantle our healthcare services and put our people at risk. We are sovereign countries. Their enemies are not our enemies. We are friends of all, enemies of none.”
Meanwhile, Jamaican Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith told a post-cabinet briefing in the past week that there is cause for alarm in the region if the U.S. persists with this policy change.
“Jamaica has had quite a long history of participation in the Cuban medical cooperation program and, in fact, that is replicated throughout the Caribbean, so the statement has been received with some concern,” she said. “The Jamaican government is examining the operation of our system. We have over 400 participants from the Cuban medical program at different levels — doctors, nurses, biomedical engineers, and technicians, so their presence here is of importance to our healthcare system.”
Cuba and Caricom have enjoyed extremely close, unbroken relations over the past 54 years, since Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados took steps in 1975 to establish diplomatic relations with the island, largely ending its hemispheric isolation and ignoring backroom threats from Washington about retaliation. The remainder of the bloc soon followed.