The United States Embassy in Barbados on Friday said there are “alternative methods available” to Caribbean countries to recruit healthcare workers, as Washington continued its criticism of Cuba’s medical brigade programme across the region.
In a post on its Facebook page, the embassy said it “is committed to holding accountable Cuban regime officials, foreign government officials, and others for facilitating forced labour in Cuba’s medical missions.
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“By participating in these programmes, despite known human rights abuses, foreign governments become complicit in the regime’s tactics. Their actions directly contribute to the abuses of Cuban workers,” the statement said.
“There are alternative methods available for Caribbean nations to recruit foreign medical workers and ethically meet the healthcare needs of their people. The United States calls on all governments and peoples to reject forced labour schemes and join us in demanding accountability and respect for human rights.”
The latest statement comes amid ongoing tension between Washington and several Caribbean governments over Cuba’s long-running medical cooperation programmes.
Earlier this week, the US government said it had not “recently” spoken to St Lucia about international education after Prime Minister Phillip J Pierre said Washington had asked his administration to stop sending nationals to study medicine in Cuba. However, the United States did not indicate whether such discussions may have taken place prior to Pierre’s statement last weekend.
“I have a big problem. Many of our doctors got trained in Cuba, and now the great United States has said we can’t do that any longer,” Pierre told delegates attending the second World Congress on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in St Lucia.
Cuba has for decades provided scholarships for Caribbean and Latin American students to study medicine at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Havana, which was officially inaugurated in 1999. The initiative offers free tuition, accommodation and boarding, and was designed to train doctors from underserved communities across the region.
Washington has also intensified its criticism of Cuba’s overseas medical missions, arguing that Havana benefits financially from the programme.
US officials say the Cuban government “is profiting off the forced labour of medical personnel” and that “renting out Cuban medical professionals at exorbitant prices and keeping the profit for regime elites is not a humanitarian gift.
“It is forced labour. It treats the doctors as commodities rather than human beings and professionals. The United States calls for an end to the Cuban regime’s coercive and exploitative labour export scheme.”
