MIAMI, United States. – The Secretary of Primary Care of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, Nésio Fernandes, told the newspaper on Wednesday 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.
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