Havana (CNN) – Cuba has offered to send doctors to more countries that fight the coronavirus. But the US State Department asks that they not accept your help.
As health care systems around the world are on the verge of collapse, Cuban health care “brigades” have been invited to help medical workers in Italy, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Suriname, Jamaica and Granada. On Tuesday, Cuban officials released a video of a field hospital that their health workers had built in Lombardy, Italy, one of the regions most affected by the coronavirus.
But the State Department wants countries to reconsider asking Cuba for help to fight the coronavirus pandemic. “Cuba offers its international medical missions to those affected by # covid-19 only to recover the money it lost when the countries stopped participating in the abusive program,” tweeted an account of the Office of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the US Department of State. USA on Wednesday.
“Host countries seeking Cuba’s help for # covid-19 should analyze the agreements and end labor abuses,” the message said.
Recent requests for help from other countries have marked an abrupt change. Cuba has seen hundreds of doctors being sent home from medical missions in Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia in recent years, after the United States criticized Cuba’s medical assistance programs, accusing them of exploiting health workers and spreading propaganda. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cuba offers some countries free healthcare in solidarity, while other countries pay for services. Deploying workers generally receive only about 20% of the wages that host countries pay for their care, a reduced salary, but much more than what Cuban doctors earn in hospitals in their home countries, where the salary maximum is approximately $ 60 a month.
The Cuban government has said it maintains the majority of wages abroad to finance the island’s free health care system.
Extremely effective in disaster relief
Like many institutions in Cuba, the local health system has seen better days. But the hypercentralization of the Cuban government, which has been so disastrous for the island’s economy, makes Cuba extremely effective in dealing with disasters. And while health professionals on the island operate with very little money, the system is designed to prevent the disease rather than waiting to treat it.
After the first cases of coronavirus were discovered in Cuba on March 11 in three Italian tourists visiting the colonial city of Trinidad, the government sent thousands of Cuban health workers, including medical students, to cross the island of Door to door to search for people with respiratory diseases that could be the coronavirus.
Soon all government resources were focused on the pandemic. Currently, Cuba has 57 confirmed cases with 1,479 people hospitalized and monitored for coronavirus symptoms.
Earlier this month, the government also took the unusual step of offering help to a British cruise ship with at least five confirmed coronavirus cases on board and dozens more people suffering from flu-like symptoms. Several other islands, including the Bahamas and Barbados, had already declined the cruise.
LOOK: MS Braemar cruise ship with 5 cases of coronavirus arrived in Cuba
The MS Braemar docked in the Port of Mariel, site of the uprising of boats of refugees fleeing from the island to the US. USA in 1980, and Cuban health workers carried out the risky, day-long operation of transporting more than 600 cruise passengers from the port to the Havana airport, where four charter planes were waiting for England.
“I am very grateful to the Cuban government for allowing this operation to proceed,” said Antony Stokes, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Cuba, the day Braemar arrived.
Now, as other countries’ healthcare systems fail, more Cuban doctors are likely to be on the front line of the pandemic. Those efforts should prompt the U.S. government to reconsider the nearly 60-year-old trade embargo on Cuba, said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Political Research, who recently called on the Trump administration to lift economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran. and Venezuela as part of the fight against the coronavirus.
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“Sanctions have a more widespread and deadly direct effect by contributing to a more widespread shortage of life-saving drugs and equipment that exacerbate an economic recession,” Weisbrot wrote to CNN in an email. “This means more shortages of supplies and vital medical needs, and more deaths.”
If Trump offered Cuba any relief from sanctions, it would be contrary to his policy of dismantling the Obama administration’s openness to Cuba. Trump also made it clear that he believes a tough stance on Cuba wins votes with Florida’s conservative Cuban-American community.
Last week, Trump offered an olive branch to a communist adversary, saying he would be willing to send aid to help North Korea fight the coronavirus. Despite Cuba’s increasing contributions to the battle against the pandemic, Havana is unlikely to receive a similar offer.
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