Cuba’s medical missions are the clearest proof of what a small socialist country can offer humanity – which is precisely why the Trump administration is working to destroy them.
This article by Carlos Martinez was first published on the Alborada Substack.
The Trump administration has found a new target in its long war on Cuba: the island’s doctors. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Washington is now moving to destroy Cuba’s overseas medical missions – one of its last remaining sources of hard currency – having already blocked its fuel shipments, sanctioned and indicted its officials, and choked off remittances. Marco Rubio has toured the Caribbean threatening visa bans against any official who keeps employing Cuban medics, denouncing the programme – bizarrely – as “forced labour” and “state-sponsored human-trafficking brigades”.
Since 1963, when the first brigade arrived in newly independent Algeria, Cuba has sent what Fidel Castro called an “army of white coats” to heal the poor of the world. Over the course of the revolution, more than 400,000 Cuban health workers have served in 164 countries. Some 24,000 currently serve across more than 50 countries, from tiny Caribbean islands to the rural villages of southern Italy. They staff the clinics no one else will.
The record of these missions is without parallel. Operation Milagro (Miracle), launched with Venezuela in 2004, has restored sight to millions of people across Latin America and the Caribbean – in Bolivia alone, Cuban doctors carried out three million ophthalmological consultations and nearly three-quarters of a million eye operations.
The Latin American School of Medicine in Havana has trained tens of thousands of doctors from the Global South free of charge, on condition that they return to serve their communities. The Henry Reeve Brigade – founded in 2005 and named after a US citizen who fought for Cuban independence – confronted Ebola in West Africa and Covid-19 in Italy, and has repeatedly been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In Jamaica, over the last three decades alone, Cuban medics have treated more than eight million patients and saved over 90,000 lives.
This is what Washington is working to dismantle. Under threat of sanctions and visa bans, Jamaica and Guyana have ended partnerships of more than 50 years’ standing; Guatemala and the Bahamas are following suit; Honduras sent home more than 150 Cuban medical workers, whose departing staff were given a tearful ovation by the residents they had served in the country’s ophthalmology clinics.
Not everyone is submitting. St Lucia’s Prime Minister Philip J Pierre said plainly that “our medical system would basically collapse without the Cuban doctors”. Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley noted last year that “we could not get through the pandemic without the Cuban nurses and the Cuban doctors”. And when the US leaned on St Vincent and the Grenadines, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves responded: “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die”.
That is the choice the US is forcing on the region: get rid of the Cuban doctors, or be punished. The world’s richest country would rather the poor of the Global South go blind and die than tolerate Cuban solidarity.
Why? Partly for the obvious reason: the missions are Cuba’s largest export, generating some $5.3 billion in 2024 – half of all its foreign earnings. Ending them is simply the latest chapter in a strategy the State Department set out in writing in 1960: to deny Cuba money and supplies, “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. More than six decades of blockade have followed that memo faithfully, at a cumulative cost to Cuba of over $160 billion, equivalent to around two trillion dollars in today’s money.
But the deeper reason is fear. The medical missions are the clearest proof of what a small socialist country can offer humanity. That is the real target. Not “trafficking”, but the threat of a good example: a blockaded island of 11 million people – poor, besieged, endlessly slandered – that sends doctors where empires send gunboats.
To wage war on Cuba’s doctors is to admit you have nothing to offer the world. Solidarity with Cuba has never been more urgent. ¡Venceremos!