MIAMI, United States. – The Cuban doctor Yoandris Sánchez Sánchez, a specialist in Comprehensive General Medicine (MGI) and a Brazilian citizen, denounced in a letter sent to CyberCuba the obstacles imposed on the island’s doctors who initially “deserted” from the Mais Médicos program and now, after its reopening with the rise to power of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, they hope to rejoin.
Sánchez Sánchez denounced that the so-called “deserter” doctors by the Cuban regime do not have access to the registration website for the Mais Médicos program.
“It happened that we ‘deserters’ -as Cuba classifies us-, between OPAS and the Cuban regime, blocked the access page to register,” he said.
“The Generalized System of Preferences (SGP), which is a website of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, tells you that you do not meet the requirements and that you should either call 136 or send an email to the address [email protected]”, he continued.
However, the doctor specified that when you choose to call those interested lose “more than an hour on the phone” and do not solve anything.
“If you write an email, they tell you – like me – that I was terminated from the program due to abandonment and they placed an administrative measure on me,” he added.
“You ask for explanations and they don’t know how to tell you anything. Those interested on our own search and find judicial processes from years ago that we did not even know existed. In my case, for example, I have processes from the year 2021 and at that time I was working as an assistant in a pharmacy ”, he also recounted.
Sánchez Sánchez considered “an absurdity and a lack of respect and ethics that the Cuban government -despite one being living abroad- continues with the yoke on it.”
The Cuban doctor also assured that he had filed a complaint through the courts since he had no other way out. “We are in need of international support. Let the world know what is happening in Brazil with us, ‘the deserting doctors’”, he finished.
Earlier this year, the Secretary of Primary Care of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, Nésio Fernandes, told the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo that his government would resume the Mais Médicos program, but giving priority to Brazilian professionals.
“The agenda to resume Mais Médicos is immediate. We want to place doctors in all Brazilian municipalities in a short period of time”, said Fernandes.
He also assured that it was not planned to “repeat the collaboration with Cuba in the previous ways, with the participation of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO, the Latin American arm of the WHO).”
At the end of last year, Brazilian Senator Humberto Costa declared to the press that the Government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would retake Mais Médicos.
“There are doctors who graduated abroad and have not yet been revalidated, there are Cuban doctors who stayed in Brazil and there are doctors who graduated and are not being absorbed by the job market. So, a similar program could be implemented, but with a predominance of Brazilian doctors”, said the senator.
The Mais Médicos program began to be implemented in 2013, following an agreement signed by then Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and the island’s regime, with PAHO as mediator.
Five years later, in November 2018 Havana decided to cancel the agreement of cooperation with Brazil, for which more than 8,000 doctors were in the South American giant, and withdraw all personnel from the Mais Médicos program under the conditions imposed by then-President Jair Bolsonaro.
The Brazilian president criticized the conditions in which the Cuban doctors were working in his country and demanded from the Cuban government, with the promise of maintaining the staff, that the island’s professionals receive their full salary, be able to travel to Brazil in the company of their family, and they submitted to a revalidation test of their titles.
The Havana regime then decided to withdraw its health workers from Brazil.
The Brazilian government paid Cuba $3,000 per month for each doctor in the “internationalist mission,” however, Cuban doctors only received 25% of their salaries (about $750). The rest, except for the 5% that went to the PAHO, ended up in the coffers of the communist regime in Havana.
