A decision by Cuba to call home more than 8,300 medical workers in Brazil will be a devastating blow to the island’s shaky economy, The Miami Herald reported.
Havana announced the recall after Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro said the Cuban doctors should get their full $3,300 per month salary that Brazil pays Havana for each doctor — Cuba now keeps nearly 75 percent of the salaries — as well as have the opportunity to revalidate their credentials in Brazil, and be allowed to bring their families to Brazil while they work there under a government-to-government agreement, the Herald reported.
Bolsonaro later added he would grant asylum to any Cuban medical professional who wants to stay there.
Elias Amor, who studies the island’s economy, told the Herald Cuba gets more than $249.5 million a year for its doctors in Brazil.
“The end of the Mais Médicos program will be a hard blow to the already ailing Cuban economy,” he told the news outlet.
The Cuban government has reported it earns more than $12.5 billion a year from the work of its professionals abroad. Amor estimates that most of it comes from Venezuela, where 21,000 Cuban health workers are located.
“Everyone expects that many doctors will remain in Brazil. That’s their chance. But most don’t know that Cuba punishes those who abandon their missions by blocking them from returning for eight years,” Paloma Nora, a doctor who defected from one of the foreign assignments and now lives in the United States, told the Herald.
Carlos Martínez, a doctor and member of the board of directors of Solidarity without Frontiers, a Hialeah, Fla.-based organization that helps Cuban medical personnel who defect, said the revenue from the Cubans who work abroad doesn’t benefit the Cuban people, “only the government.”
“The Cuban doctors are sent to the most dangerous places in the world. Many times they work in precarious conditions, in violent places, with little pay. The money paid by international organizations and governments goes to pay for luxuries for Cuba’s rulers,” Martínez said.
Martínez said his organization is lobbying Congress to reactivate the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, canceled by the Obama administration in 2017, that provided visas to more than 8,000 Cubans doctors who defected abroad.
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