Cuban Doctors Arrive in Honduras to Fight COVID-19

Cuban doctors and Honduran specialists studying on the island arrived at Tegucigalpa Sunday as part of Cuba’s medical missions across the world to fight the novel coronavirus.

“Right now, we’re seeing that health personnel is making us sick, health personnel who are insufficiently qualified, health personnel who definitely have to be replaced because they are fatigued,” Honduran Health Minister Alba Consuelo Flores told a news conference Thursday confirming the arrival.

The medical brigade is made up of 20 health professionals including four emergency surgeons, two epidemiologists, six intensive-care nurses, and four biomedical technicians. Also, 53 Honduran medical students, specializing in Cuba, joined the mission.

Honduras has some 4,000 medics across 33 hospitals, according to statistics from the Health Ministry. They serve a population of some 9.2 million people, 62 percent of whom live in poverty.

Cuba previously had a medical mission in Honduras that arrived in 1998 after it was devastated by Hurricane Mitch, however, the program was suspended last year when the right-wing Honduran government did not renew the agreement.

Since the outbreak began, Cuba has been at the frontline of the fight against the pandemic, sending doctors and nurses to 19 nations across the world, which include Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Haiti, Suriname, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, St. Lucia, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Italy, Andorra, Togo, St. Thomas and Prince, Angola, and Qatar.

“It just goes to the history of Cuba’s deep and long-lasting commitment to humanitarian solidarity with other countries,” Peter Kornbluh, Director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University told Democracy Now.