MIAMI, United States. – Outreach Aid to the Americas (OAA) organizations, Prisoners Defenders (PD) and the Free Cuban Medical Guild (GMCL) presented this Friday in Miami an initiative to denounce the consequences of the application of the so-called “Eight-Year Law”, which affects both doctors considered “deserters” by the regime and their children and other family members.
The report exposed by the president of Prisoners Defenders, Javier Larrondo, was prepared based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 191 testimonies from doctors -76% of them considered “deserters” by the Cuban Government-, and yields “disturbing” data, according to the organization itself.
Larrondo stressed that 83% of the children of the professionals consulted were minors when their parents began their last “mission” and that of these, three out of 10 children were between zero and five years old. Meanwhile, 26% of the professionals surveyed have never seen their children again.
One of those sons is Miguel García Roman, today a young activist doctor of the Free Cuban Medical Guild who offered his testimony in Miami. The young man, who is also a 11J protester, referred to the consequences of living without his father, also a “missions” doctor for 11 years, in which he suffered emotional and psychological damage, affective deficiencies and even bullying by their peers at school.
During the presentation of the report, Dr. Roberto Organero also intervened. “When you are born in Cuba – he said – you become a tool of the system and you are forced to be an adept, and if you don’t, you are a traitor. You have to always go with your mask, and you get used to living in that system of double standards.
Dr. Idalma Leyva also participated in the event, via Zoom. The Cuban doctor residing in Brazil said that she had been a “victim of modern slavery of human trafficking disguised under the clothes of Cuban missions.”
Leyva suffered 11 years of forced separation from her family and now wants to give a voice to the thousands of colleagues who, out of fear, do not want to speak. “From the moment I was declared a deserter, the threats began, the reprisals against all the collaborators, but I could never imagine the macabre system that was behind all that and that points to the deepest thing that we have, which are the families” .
Dr. Leyva assures that the agents of the Cuban regime attacked their families in Cuba when they did not return after completing their last “mission”.
“They usurped the childhood of our children, it was a very macabre, very cruel experiment. Today I demand justice, that the weight of the law falls on all the executors of modern slavery”, he requested.
Finally, Dr. Miguel Angel Ruano Sánchez, a Cuban doctor residing in Colombia, intervened.
“I have been separated from my family for 20 years; my father died two years ago in Cuba, I could not access my country, they returned me. My mother died on December 14 and I could not go to his funeral or his cremation, ”lamented Dr. Ruano.
The most recent advances in the complaints and claims established as a result of the “Cuban medical missions” before the United Nations and other international organizations were also announced at the event.
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