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(I take anything written about Cuba in the NY Times with a grain of salt
but still find this disturbing. With the growing dynamic toward market
solutions in Cuba, is it any surprise that some of its citizens would
want to exploit their labor power as a free market commodity?)
NY Times, Sept. 29 2017
Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’
By ERNESTO LONDOÑO
RIO DE JANEIRO — In a rare act of collective defiance, scores of Cuban
doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their
country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to
be released from what one judge called a “form of slave labor.”
Thousands of Cuban doctors work abroad under contracts with the Cuban
authorities. Countries like Brazil pay the island’s Communist government
millions of dollars every month to provide the medical services,
effectively making the doctors Cuba’s most valuable export.
But the doctors get a small cut of that money, and a growing number of
them in Brazil have begun to rebel. In the last year, at least 150 Cuban
doctors have filed lawsuits in Brazilian courts to challenge the
arrangement, demanding to be treated as independent contractors who earn
full salaries, not agents of the Cuban state.
“When you leave Cuba for the first time, you discover many things that
you had been blind to,” said Yaili Jiménez Gutierrez, one of the doctors
who filed suit. “There comes a time when you get tired of being a slave.”
Cuban artists and athletes have defected during overseas trips for
decades, most of them winding up in the United States. But the lawsuits
in Brazil represent an unusual rebellion that takes aim at one of Cuba’s
signature efforts. Sending doctors overseas is not only a way for Cuba
to earn much-needed income, but it also helps promote the nation’s image
as a medical powerhouse that routinely comes to the world’s aid.
The legal challenges are all the more important because the doctors have
lost a common backup plan: going to the United States. The American
government, which has long tried to undermine Cuba’s leaders,
established a program in 2006 to welcome Cuban doctors, with the aim of
exacerbating the island’s brain drain.
But in one of his final attempts to normalize relations with Cuba,
President Barack Obama in January ended the program, which had allowed
Cuban doctors stationed in other countries to get permanent residency
visas for the United States.
“The end of the program was a huge blow to us,” said Maireilys Álvarez
Rodríguez, another of the doctors who sued in Brazil. “That was our way
out.”
The end of the visa program means that the future of these doctors now
rests in the hands of the Brazilian courts. They have mostly ruled
against the doctors, but some judges have sided with them, allowing the
doctors to work on their own and get paid directly.
The doctors’ defiance puts them at risk of serious repercussions by the
Cuban government, including being barred from the island and their
families for years.
The seeds of the rebellion were planted a year ago in a conversation
between a Cuban doctor and a clergyman in a remote village in
northeastern Brazil.
Anis Deli Grana de Carvalho, a doctor from Cuba, was coming to the end
of her three-year medical assignment. But having married a Brazilian
man, she wanted to stay and keep working.
The pastor was outraged to learn that, under the terms of their
employment, Cuban doctors earn only about a quarter of the amount the
Brazilian government pays Cuba for their services.
He quickly put her in touch with a lawyer in Brasília, the Brazilian
capital. In late September of last year, she sued in federal court to
work as an independent contractor.
Within weeks, scores of other Cuban doctors followed Dr. Grana’s lead
and filed suits in Brazilian courts. The Brazilian government, which
struck the deal with Cuba in 2013 to provide doctors in underserved
parts of the country, is appealing the cases that doctors have won and
thinks it will prevail.
“There is no injustice,” said Brazil’s health minister, Ricardo Barros.
“When they signed up they agreed to the terms.”
Dr. Álvarez said that the stipend offered by the Cuban government to
work for a few years in Brazil seemed appealing to her and her husband,
Arnulfo Castanet Batista, also a doctor, when they signed up in 2013.
It meant leaving behind their two children in the care of relatives, but
each of them would earn 2,900 Brazilian reais a month — then worth about
$1,400, and now worth $908 — an amount that seemed enormous compared
with the roughly $30 a month Cuban
