Lucia* graduated with a medical degree from Cuba in 2009. Two years after earning his degree, he enrolled in the internationalization missions of the Cuban Government, the well-known brigades of professionals from the island that are sent to countries that hire their services.
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Lucía saw this option as a way out to improve her quality of life, which she says was very precarious at the time.
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“I didn’t even have a house. She lived in a borrowed room. That (the brigades) was the only way I had to buy things for my children. I had to leave a one-and-a-half-year-old child with his grandmother in order to improve my economic situation, ”Lucía tells EL TIEMPO.
In 2011, the Cuban medical brigade moved it to Carabobo (Venezuela). But when she arrived in that country, they confiscated her passport and read her a disciplinary regulation that, among other things, prohibited her from having friendly or romantic relationships with non-Cuban people so as not to “affect the prestige of the mission.”
“During working hours I had to do everything: prescribe medications, attend consultations and clean the office. In addition to that, he had to falsify documents: if he attended to ten people during the day, he had to notify 20 or 25. If he didn’t, they scolded me”, he explains.
After her workday, Lucía had to get home before 6 pm At that time, a superior called her to verify that, indeed, she had returned and they kept her under constant surveillance, according to what she says. In addition, Lucía affirms that Cuba kept most of her salary, and they only gave her a small percentage that barely covered her basic expenses and those of her family on the island.
If she decides to leave the mission, the Cuban government would keep her passport, invalidate her university degree and force her to be outside the island without seeing her family for eight years.
He stayed that way until December 31, 2013. Between January and February 2014 he returned with his family, but in March they asked him to leave with another brigade for Brazil. “It was the same story, they took away my passport, but the difference is that here they didn’t have as much control over us when we went out,” says Lucía, recalling that during her time in Brazilian territory, Cuba took about 75% of her your salary.
“They should have given us 15,000 reais, but they only paid us 2,976,” he says. However, the conditions in Brazil were a little different: he was able to save and even buy a couple of pieces of furniture for his house. But in 2015 they told her that she had to leave her home, because if she did not, they would remove her from the brigade and return her to Cuba.
“I didn’t want to, but they got heavy. They told me that I had to be grateful to the revolution. I refused and that led to my mission being interrupted. I was never able to return to Brazil and they told me that I was not trustworthy. Then I spent five years without being able to leave Cuba (2015-2019)”.
After those five years of punishment that they imposed on her, Lucía left the island and went to another country in the Caribbean. There she met her current husband, who in 2006 also left an internationalization mission.
One of a thousand voices denouncing forced labor in Cuban medical missions
Lucía’s story is part of the 1,111 testimonies that NGOs have collected in recent years Prisoners DefendersCivil Rights Defenders and the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (Cadal) with complaints from Cuban professionals who have experienced serious injustices during their active role in the brigades.
These organizations presented a week ago the third expansion of a report that originally came to light in 2019 and that at that time was sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN.
The 56-page text (called ‘1,111 Cuban professionals vs. Cuban Government’) focuses on these missions and describes it as a system of “slavery” erected on a “coercive model” and based on international agreements “null and void”.
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During the presentation of the new annex, which was attended by organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and MEP Dita Charanzová, it was highlighted that the testimonies of professionals abroad show how “they have been subjected to serious injustices , persecution, slavery, threats, violence, harassment and family separation”.
Cuba calls internationalization missions the programs to bring professionals from their country to work in other nations. Perhaps the best known initiative is that of doctors, which began in 1963 with the first contingent of doctors who traveled to Algeria. It is estimated that, until the start of the pandemic, Cuba had taken more than 400,000 professionals to 164 countries, including doctors, musicians, sailors, engineers, athletes and teachers.
Although the complaints about these brigades are not new, the report of the three NGOs sheds light on how frequent these subjugation practices applied by the island are.
Broadly speaking, the report states that between 50,000 and 100,000 Cuban workers abroad suffer these conditions of slavery. In addition, the document details that, of the 1,111 people interviewed, 75 percent said they had not voluntarily gone to the brigade, 13 percent were conditioned by mobility limitations and precarious conditions on the island, and 12 percent cent was for coercive reasons.
“Medical missions are an act of coercion in many ways. If you refuse, you are branded and/or discriminated against, forced to take on the worst jobs and the worst job placement regardless of your ability or performance. Basically you can be a very good professional, but if you do not accept their conditions you are punished both openly and in an underhand way by the authorities of the Ministry of Health, who obviously answer to the Government”, reads another of the anonymous testimonies of the NGO report.
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In fact, the organizations emphasize that if a professional decides to leave the mission, the Cuban authorities retain their passport and apply the well-known 8 year law, which stipulates that a “deserter” will not be able to return to the island until that period of time has expired, separating him from his family. The complaint provides documentary evidence of these sanctions.
The text, on the other hand, points out that the forced and traumatic separation of families acts as a “stressful and toxic factor” for the victims and their families in Cuba. Among the identified causes (both in parents and children) are: anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, lower intelligence quotient and obesity.
“The most common feeling that prevails among those who leave a mission and stay in a foreign country is that they are still prisoners years later because their relatives remain on the island. They are threatened and families in Cuba are visited to say that their relative is a deserter,” Javier Larrondo, president of Prisoners Defenders, told this newspaper.
wage withholding
The report also denounces and details how the program keeps most of its professionals’ salaries, around 75 percent, on average, through two payment models.
In the first, the worker is paid by Cuba, which gives him between 9 and 25 percent of what he receives from the host country. According to these NGOs, the Government of Cuba pays an average of 525 dollars to professionals when it charges an average of more than 3,500 dollars for each one. In other words, he pockets 85 percent of the profits.
In the second model, an employer company of the Cuban State remains as intermediary of the salary commission, which is normally between 75 and 90 percent of the base salary. The NGOs presented documents in this regard, such as that of a sailor in the MSC cruise company (in Europe) with a salary of 408 euros per month and from whom 326.40 euros were withheld.
The sales of professional services that the so-called internationalist missions of Cuba represent are the largest source of foreign currency income in the country, even above tourism, since at least 2005.
In 2018 they accounted for some 8,500 million dollars (7,492 million euros), compared to 2,900 million dollars (2,556 million euros) from tourism, and represented between 40 and 50 percent of its balance of payments abroad, estimate these NGOs.
Cuba emphatically rejects forced labor in medical missions
Not only the three organizations that created this report have referred to these brigades. In 2019, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Urmila Bhoola, and the special rapporteur on human trafficking, Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, assured that these working conditions “could rise to forced labor”, which ” constitutes a contemporary form of slavery”.
In this sense, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed last year its “concern” about the alleged forced labor of Cuban workers on missions abroad.
Last year, the European Parliament issued a resolution condemning “the systemic violations of human and labor rights committed by Cuba against its personnel on medical missions.”
Regarding Cuba’s position, the Government denied in 2020 before the United Nations any relationship between its missions and trafficking, slavery or forced labor. He pointed to “spurious campaigns” by the United States to “discredit and “sabotage” this system, based on “altruism, humanism and international solidarity.”
Cuba stressed at that time that the missions always respond to express requests from the host countries, that their participants are always volunteers, that they all have a contract and that labor laws apply to them.
Finally, the regime pointed out that in no case is their passport withdrawn or forced to remain in the mission, much less penalized if they decide to leave earlier.
CARLOS JOSE REYES GARCIA
With information from Efe
* Name changed for security
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