Cuba’s doctors were a lifeline for the world. Now the Caribbean is shamefully complicit in the US drive to expel them | Kenneth Mohammed - Sopuli

> On Friday the Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez accused the US of “extorting” countries by forcing them to cancel decades-old deals with Havana for the supply of doctors. > The tone was set in Donald Trump’s first term. In 2018, 8,300 Cuban doctors left Brazil after the country’s then president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, closely aligned with Washington, threatened the programme and its payment structure, questioning the qualifications of the Cubans – issues that had never been raised when their services were indispensable. > Since then, the US has pushed countries across the region to terminate these agreements, branding them “forced labour” and even “human trafficking” because the Cuban state retains a share of salaries. Conveniently ignoring that these doctors were trained free of charge by the Cuban government, unlike their heavily indebted counterparts in countries such as the UK where medical graduates have the onerous burden of student debt for decades. > The consequences have been enormous. Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Guyana and St Vincent and the Grenadines have all capitulated. Across the Caribbean and Latin America, programmes, some as old as 50 years, are being dismantled, doctors withdrawn and already fragile systems strained, all under the threat of US visa and diplomatic sanctions. Only St Kitts and Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago have yet to follow. Millions could lose basic healthcare, with Indigenous communities particularly exposed