The U.S. rulers are stepping up their six-decades-long assault on Cuba, in retaliation for working people, led by Fidel Castro, making a socialist revolution there and setting an example for toilers everywhere.
Washington is enforcing an oil blockade, threatening to slap damaging tariffs on any government that sells or donates oil to Cuba. These moves have drawn protests worldwide against the U.S. rulers’ brutal attack on Cuban sovereignty.
On March 31 a Russian tanker, with acquiescence from Washington, landed in Cuba and delivered 730,000 barrels of oil. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said she intends to ship oil to Cuba as well, for humanitarian reasons.
Washington is exerting maximum pressure on governments worldwide to expel volunteer Cuban doctors who have been providing medical care in these countries.
Cuba initiated its medical missions to aid toilers abroad in 1963, when 58 personnel went to Algeria to help rebuild a health care system after the victory of the independence movement over French colonial rule. “There are 4 million more Algerians than Cubans, and colonialism has left them with many diseases, but they have only a third — and even less — of the doctors we have,” Fidel Castro said. He explained this was why Cuba was recruiting 50 volunteer doctors to go to Algeria.
In 2004, Cuba launched Operation Milagro, providing free eye care and surgeries to prevent blindness. This program has restored vision to over 4 million people around the world.
In 2005 Cuba established the Henry Reeve International Contingent, which provides emergency care to respond to natural disasters and epidemics, like the Ebola crisis in West Africa, a cholera outbreak in Haiti and COVID-19 in Italy and Latin America.
On March 2, the U.S. Congress passed a bill imposing sanctions on any country where Cuban health workers are dispensing much-needed care. Last August, Washington began revoking visas to travel to the U.S. for elected officials abroad who have rejected expelling Cuban doctors.
One of those standing firm is Trinidad Prime Minister Keith Rowley. “I just came back from California, and if I never go back there again in my life, I will ensure that the sovereignty of Trinidad and Tobago is known to its people and respected by all,” he said. Trinidad has relied heavily on doctors “mainly from Cuba over the decades,” he added.
Cuban medical personnel have served millions of people, often in remote areas around the world where there is little health care. In 2023 there were nearly 24,000 Cuban medical personnel working in 56 countries.
In the face of this record, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been the point person for Washington’s slanders about the Cuban Revolution’s medical missions. “Cuba’s labor export programs, which include the medical missions, enrich the Cuban regime,” Rubio claimed in February, “and in the case of Cuba’s overseas medical missions, deprive ordinary Cubans of the medical care they desperately need in their home country.”
Of course, he doesn’t mention the main cause of deprivation in Cuba, medical and otherwise. That’s the punishing economic war the U.S. rulers have conducted against Cuba for decades.
The latest government in Latin America to announce it was ending Cuba’s medical program is Guatemala. Begun in 1998, there are 412 Cuban medical personnel there today, including 333 doctors. The first contingent of health workers left for home April 2.
In a farewell meeting the day before, Cuba’s ambassador to Guatemala, Nazario Fernández, described the work the doctors have carried out. He repudiated those like Rubio who “try to denigrate that work, since the humanism demonstrated every day over nearly 28 years remains alive in the people of this sister nation.”
Thanks from Guatemala
Also speaking was Sheila Pamela Leyla, who helps coordinate the Guatemalan Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance. She gave the lie to Washington’s slanders.
“You arrived not with weapons or preconditions, but with stethoscopes and an iron will,” she told the Cubans. “Since then you have been the face of hope for millions of Guatemalans who, before seeing a Cuban doctor, had never had access to decent medical care.”
The Cuban medical brigade made the mountains, jungles and poorest neighborhoods of this land their own home, she said.
“It fills us with profound pride to contemplate the magnitude of the work they have built, a task that transcends the professional to become a monument to fraternity,” she added. “They leave with their heads held high, with the heroic satisfaction of a duty fulfilled and with the certainty that their time in our country has left a mark of health and dignity that time can never erase.
“To be an internationalist is to repay our debt to humanity,” she said, quoting Fidel Castro from a 1988 speech titled, “As long as the empire exists, we will never lower our guard.”
They taught us that medicine is not a commodity, but a calling, Leyla said. “We have gathered here to say thank you.”