MEXICO CITY.- The Cuban state has built an image of anti-imperialist belligerence and a Caribbean paradise that is supported by two main pillars. One of them is to supposedly have educated citizens with free access to universities. The other is to train doctors to send them to as many countries as they request. Propaganda has wasted efforts in telling human stories, where doctors travel out of solidarity to the most remote spaces. What that official discourse does not tell is that most of the professionals accept these contracts to minimally alleviate the deficiencies they have in Cuba. Nor do they mention that contracting with the Cuban state as a mediator means being stripped of more than 80 percent of their salary.
Cuba has been continually singled out for the serious violations of Human Rights that the state executes against the professionals whose services it exports. It has even been described as modern slavery the treatment they give to collaborators, those who withdraw their passports, limit their mobility, check their social networks. They are told all the time what to say and what to do, who to talk to, what to lie about.
The organization Prisoners Defenders from 2019 to 2022 has obtained more than 1,800 testimonies of victims describing conditions of modern slavery in missions in 47 countries. Knowing this, why are there still Cuban doctors who continue to accept these contracts? If not, what other alternative is there?
These are the testimonies of two Cuban doctors aged 30 and 34 who have agreed to speak with CubaNet on condition of anonymity. One is currently in Venezuela as part of the medical mission in that country. The other, although he is active on the island, has decided not to contract abroad if the Cuban government mediates.
“I studied medicine to go on a mission”
Fortunately I am in Caracas, where the situation is not as bad as in the interior of the country. Here at least there is food, you just have to have a way to pay for it. In addition, it is undeniable that Venezuela has been improving in the last year. There is less inflation and the dollar stabilizes. At the beginning I got to charge up to 2 USD per month. Even so, he was “lucky”, because there were states in worse conditions. The collaborators came from the island to those states with a sack of rice and another of beans so as not to starve. The women brought their intimates. From Cuba they also sent dollars to Venezuela. Imagine sending remittances from Cuba to some country, as that country has to be. The normal flow is there, not the other way around.
In reality, many still live in subhuman conditions during their mission time. What happens is that we Cubans are used to surviving in total precariousness, as if we were not people. But there came a point that could no longer be endured and many protested. In recent months, the food in the centers has been better and the salary has risen a little.
Every month I receive the equivalent of 58 USD that I spend entirely on my food and hygiene. I can’t save anything or think about bringing gifts to my family when I go on vacation. I am not here to buy clothes, equipment, furniture. That’s impossible. If I came it is because in addition to my salary, they give 12,000 Cuban pesos each month to my family that helps them eat. And another 12,000 more are delivered to me at the end of the mission. With current prices I know that won’t solve much for me. But if I stayed in Cuba I would only have my salary, which is equivalent to four packages of chicken in the informal market.
Since I started the mission in 2020, the norm is to take away our passport immediately. They deliver it to you in Cuba at the airport and they take it from you as soon as you step on Venezuela. We do not travel with an ordinary blue passport but with an official red one. We also cannot go out after 6:00 pm and you must always inform where you are going. Every afternoon you have to report so they know you’re home. It’s not that they’re worried about our safety. If that were the case, they would not send us to dangerous areas of the country, what worries them is that the collaborators will escape.
But control goes further. We are asked not to share Cuban things with Venezuelans. For example, we should not comment on the Cuban political system and the economy. They want to hide the disaster that this system has meant for us and therefore for Venezuela. We can’t talk about politics, or the blackouts, or the lack of food. They also ask us not to give opinions about Maduro, about communism.
A typical question that Venezuelans ask a lot is: “Are there elections in Cuba?” That one does not answer. There are those who risk and speak, but you are risking the mission. There is also a control of what you do on your social networks. To begin with, we are asked to share “successes” and photos of the mission here, which we tweet in certain campaigns. They even “encourage” you to open profiles on Twitter. If you don’t, you don’t lose the contract, but it does affect your evaluation, which you then need to go on another mission, to a better country. Because yes, they review all our networks: what we post, who tells us, what we answer. Some brigades even require their members to provide passwords to their accounts in order to better review and view their messages.
Here I live in an apartment that pays me the mission with two other collaborators. They are my colleagues, not my friends and that is the first thing to be clear about.
When the people who live with you know that a sanction awaits them if you do something, you should always be attentive to what you say and do because they are watching you. If someone leaves the mission, the punishment affects those who lived with him.
First, an analysis is made with the entire brigade, where any number of small details that are better hidden, dirty laundry, come to the surface. For those who shared a house with the deserter comes the worst punishment. The authorities won’t believe you if you tell them he left behind your back and you didn’t know. They always reply that you should have seen or heard something and you didn’t report it. Your job here is not just to practice your profession. You also have to watch out for others.
It depends on that that they don’t send you to a worse place, screw up your evaluation or take away your access to a container at the end of the mission if that’s what you aspired to. That is another topic. The container is a privilege reserved for bosses and those close to them, for those who are most active in networks and political work, for those who snitch the most. It does not matter if you are the worst professional, as long as you meet the above requirements, you will be rewarded. The same repressive organizations in Cuba function here: the UJC, the union, the PCC, with the same dynamics and functions.
For me the worst thing is that you are held responsible for what the other does. Even if he’s a good person, he feels pressured to rat you out. In the end, no one here takes risks for a colleague. Each one comes with a goal and you can’t let anything affect it. If you want to have access to some things, you have to act in a certain way and accept the rules, even if you don’t like them. Only in this way will you get out of poverty in Cuba a little.
Here are doctors, technologists, laboratory personnel, nurses. There are also people who do not know what they do or what function they fulfill. I imagine they are from Security because there are always agents in each brigade. Anyone can be watching you. How to know what the agent’s face is? In general I feel watched and controlled, but I knew it would be that way before I came and I accepted it. I studied medicine to go on a mission. Otherwise I will never fix my house.
“The dictatorship is not going to exploit me anymore”
If I’m still in Cuba today it’s because I don’t have the money to fly to Nicaragua, or family abroad to lend it to me, and I’m not going on a mission. The dictatorship is not going to exploit me anymore.
When I finished 12th grade my grades were impeccable, I could have chosen the career I wanted, but my dream was to be a doctor. For six years I studied and tried very hard without even having a computer. My professional parents couldn’t afford it. I lived with many mediocre students who barely passed the entrance exams and who passed the course with the “help” of the professors. Medicine in this country is a career that aims to be massive, it does not seek quality. What the government wants is to have many doctors to export them. It doesn’t matter if they are good or bad as long as they are enough. There came my first disappointment.
I graduated in 2017 with the second best grade in my university. I did not want a specialty because that came with a regulation and I have always been clear that in this country there is no life, that you have to leave. If they regulated me, they tied me up.
They immediately sent me to an office in the countryside more than 30 kilometers from my home. Every day I would get under the sun, with the white coat to ask for a bottle to see if someone would take pity and go ahead of me. If I took out my salary to pay for trucks, I spent all the money going to and from work. In the office, the working conditions were very bad, even the ceiling leaked and they required endless bureaucracy. This country lives by showing impeccable numbers that are basically manipulated. I am grateful that at least in those years there was the basic medicine because later we had neither cotton, nor a dipyrone, nor an antibiotic. More than doctors, we had to become sorcerers, and the worst thing is that we are the ones who face the patient.
Many people tell me to go on a mission and save money to go or to desert, but I am not willing. The first thing is that I am not going to allow myself to be used by this government that I despise. The other thing is that deserting means not seeing my family for years, and I’m not going to separate from them. My goal is to get a contract on my own and then take my wife and little girl with me. How am I going to leave them in Cuba?
Cuban missions abroad are modern slavery. They have thousands of workers working for them and taking more than 80% of their salary. In addition to subjecting them to degrading conditions in every way. For dignity I can’t stand that quiet.
You deceive a town for more than 60 years. You supposedly give him free healthcare and education. You tell them from birth that you made them people, that they wouldn’t have studied if it wasn’t for you. Then you graduate him and give him a miserable salary that isn’t even enough to eat, but they have to thank you. This is how the Cuban dictatorship works.
That same “benefactor” makes disadvantageous contracts for his workers and sends them to work for him. They spend two or three years in a foreign country under surveillance, but like sheep and obeying orders. Some are even happy because they believe that they will solve their problems with the crumbs they leave. But the reality is that you are working for a pittance, away from your family, which is your moral and spiritual sustenance. You stop seeing your children grow up, you can’t say goodbye to your parents if they die, marriages break up with distance.
After three years you come back, and the four kilos they give you run out right away and you have to go out again because you can’t stand misery anymore. So you spend years from one mission to another, momentarily solving without knowing what a fair payment is. Something that we Cubans do not have, nor will we have if the government mediates. A quest is a patch, it doesn’t heal anything. In the end you neither improve your life, nor are you with your family, nor are you free.
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