If in Qatar you ask about Dukhan, a city 80 kilometers west of the capital Doha, they tell you that their first oil reserves were discovered there and that there are spectacular beaches.
But many times a piece of information that has more to do with Cuba than with the history of the wealth of this Arab nation also comes up in the conversation, where in December 2022 Argentina was crowned champion of the World Cup.
In the vicinity of that Qatari city rises the Cuban Hospital, a Qatari-run health center in which almost all the staff are Cuban.
It is in the middle of the desert, two hours by bus from Doha. Outside, the flags of both countries fly.
The center has received distinctions of excellence and praise for its good service and the professionalism of its workers, but also criticism from human rights organizations that denounce the treatment that employees have received.
BBC Mundo wanted to know more about the hospital services and the complaints that affect it, but the Cuban government, the Ministry of Health and the Cuban embassy in Qatar did not respond to the numerous requests for information, while the Qatari government declined to comment on the situation. It was also not possible to obtain permission to visit the center.
An opportunity
The ties between Qatar and Cuba began in 1989 and were strengthened in 1998 with the inauguration of the Cuban embassy in Doha. The Qatari opened its doors in Havana in 2001.
“Relations converge at a key moment,” explains Erick Viramontes, assistant professor of international relations at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey and a scholar of relations between Qatar and Latin America.
“On the one hand, Cuba was looking for new alliances after the collapse of the Soviet Union -its main foreign support until then- and the tightening of the US embargo. And on the other, a new vision was born in Qatar that sought a greater international presence,” he explained. to BBC World.
Qatar is a rich but small state, with fewer than three million inhabitants, and it is located in the Persian Gulf, the area with the greatest transit of oil in the world and considered a highly volatile region due to tensions between its neighbors, including find Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Experts point out that these conditions, together with the modern vision of the emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, who reigned between 1995 and 2013, prompted the country to forge cooperation with many actors as a way to strengthen its security, import foreign talent and increase its relevance. globally.
A convenient platform for the emergence of initiatives such as the Cuban Hospital.
“In Qatar there was a demand to develop its health sector and it meets the availability and reputation of Cuban medicine, which becomes a source of income for the island at a difficult time,” says Viramontes.
“Qatar is an exception within Cuban internationalism,” adds John Kirk, a scholar on the subject at Dalhousie University in Canada, “an example of Cuba trying to earn money with the talent of its doctors to subsidize its health system, deteriorated by the situation economic”.
It is also “a unique situation” that there is a center called Hospital Cubano outside of Cuba with almost all the professionals who come from the island.
Kirk says that from the beginning of the Cuban revolution in the 1960s to the 1990s, the missions took place mainly in countries with fewer resources, but that in recent decades they have also begun to take place in wealthier nations, capable of offering more capital to the State exchange of their collaboration.
“Such are the examples of recent missions in Italy, Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” says Kirk.
60 years of Cuban medical missions
“Internationalism is a principle that has characterized Public Health in Cuba since the first Cuban medical collaboration began in 1963 in Algeria,” the Cuban Foreign Ministry once highlighted on Twitter.
In more than 60 years of collaborations, Cuba celebrates having attended more than 2,000 million patients in more than 150 countries around the world. At the beginning of 2023, almost 24,000 Cuban health collaborators provide services in 56 countries, according to the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The sending of health professionals to other countries is allowed in part by the eight doctors for every 1,000 inhabitants that Cuba hasone of the best records in Latin America and the world according to the World Bank.
But other voices, some included in this report, consider that this practice is also a diplomatic resource and a way of income to offer a good image abroad and alleviate an economy hit by the US embargo and productive deficiencies.
A reputed center in Qatar
The Cuban Hospital is close to one of the headquarters of Qatar Petroleum, one of the most important public companies in the country.
“In its beginnings, it was conceived to be a small hospital in the gas area in the northwest of the State,” explained the head of the mission in Qatar, Dr. Ernesto López Cruz, in an interview published in 2019 on the website of the Ministry of Cuban health.
“But today more than 60% of the patients who are treated there come from the capital (…) In addition, more than 80% of the diplomatic corps accredited in the country are treated in our hospital.”
The building was inaugurated in 2012, although the collaborations between Qatar and Cuba in health date from the beginning of the century, after an agreement between the emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani and the then Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The hospital is run by HMC, the main public health provider in Qatar, but staffed by SMC, which is responsible for marketing the Caribbean island’s health services abroad.
“Very good care is given; Cuban doctors treat them warmly and are excellent professionals,” a Colombian expatriate told BBC Mundo in Doha.
“During the covid-19 pandemic, the work of Cuban doctors was key to controlling the virus,” highlighted a Venezuelan couple.
Qatar is one of the most desired medical missions by Cubans, according to several of those interviewed by BBC Mundo. It is estimated that about 400 work in the hospital.
There they live in modern facilities with a swimming pool, sports courts and shared rooms for which they do not have to pay.
For many doctors, the Qatari experience is a way to escape for a while -usually between two and four years- from the precarious economic situation on the island, earn more money and discover a world to which they have restricted access.
The critics
However, not everyone is satisfied after going to serve in Qatar.
“They violated our rights from start to finish,” a doctor who spent four years in Qatar tells BBC Mundo and who asks to preserve her name.
“When you arrive, they take your passport and don’t give it back to you until you leave. You live as if you were on a scholarship (boarding school), with guided and supervised activities, and the salary is derisory compared to what a doctor earns in Qatar,” keep going.
The doctor is referring to her official passport, the document that is issued in Cuba to those who travel under the interest of social or political organizations.
His testimony coincides with reports by Human Rights Watch, concerns expressed by the United Nations and with other accounts collected by Prisoners Defenders, a Spain-based NGO that watches over human rights in Cuba and is linked to the opposition group Unión Patriótica de Cuba.
The president of the latter entity, Javier Larrondo, assures that in Qatar “workers are constantly monitored, they suffer curfews in their residences and cannot spend the night outside. It is as if they lived in a dystopian world.”
The Cuban doctor adds that the isolation of the hospital makes it difficult to socialize outside the compound and interact with locals.
“I went above all wanting to know the Arab world, but being there was a sacrifice; seeing how they took my money or how I always had to face them with oriented activities,” he says.
In 2019, UN representatives wrote a letter to Cuba expressing their concern at similar allegations in other medical missions.
According to the letter, the government “would withhold a significant percentage of the salary that the host countries pay for Cuban professionals who are part of an internationalization mission.”
These are some of the issues that BBC Mundo tried to address with the Cuban authorities through repeated requests to different instances, but received no response.
Among the latest official statements on the subject is a tweet published by President Miguel Díaz-Canel following a report prepared by Prisoners Defenders in 2019.
“The United States seeks to re-establish the brain drain program for Cuban doctors,” it said, denouncing that the qualifications of Cuban health programs as “modern slavery” and “human trafficking” were an “imperial lie.”
“Regulated” population
In Qatar, the public health corporation pays the Cuban embassy a “significant figure” that is later distributed to Cuban employees, a former hospital employee with knowledge of its management told BBC Mundo.
“They receive around US$1,000,” says Larrondo.
The remuneration is much more than what doctors earn in Cuba -no more than US$250 a month-, but less than what a specialist in Qatar receives.one of the countries with the highest per capita income in the world (US$66,000, according to World Bank data).
In 2022, salaried workers in Qatar earned an average of $3,200 per month, though that amount fluctuates between many unskilled migrants earning close to or slightly more than the minimum wage, graduated Western expatriates, and Qataris, who are at the top. salary working many in the generous public sector.
However, academic John Kirk points out that “Cuba is a socialist country where doctors are trained for free and there is another level of consciousness.”
The Cuban doctor interviewed by BBC Mundo acknowledges that the salary controversy did not seem to matter equally to all her colleagues.
“Many colleagues, with sacrifice and limiting their tastes and even eating properly, improved their conditions when they returned to Cuba,” he points out.
Health workers in Cuba are considered a “regulated” population and are limited to leaving the country, requiring special authorization before receiving a regular passport, Human Rights Watch notes.
According to the island’s legislation, these regulations serve to “preserve the qualified labor force for the economic, social and scientific-technical development of the country,” a group that includes health personnel.
For the Cuban government, health is a pillar of its socialist project and its solidarity and example to the world; and he regards these polemics as attacks by the foreign press and the US-led capitalist world.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-64125867, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-27 11:30:07
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