Marco Rubio and His Obsession with Ending Cuban Medical Brigades

Stefania Bonaldi, the former mayor of Crema, Italy, continues to speak of Cuban doctors with great admiration and gratitude. The same is true for residents of that city and also of Turin. The doctors arrived from Cuba in March and April 2020, when they were most needed, as COVID-19 was believed to threaten everyone, with hundreds dying at home due to a lack of medical care. Nearly 100 doctors and nurses battled the pandemic tirelessly for several months. The image that remains of them is that of "heroes." Subsequently, seeing their professionalism and dedication, other regions signed agreements with the Cuban government, particularly Calabria in the south. As of May 2025, approximately 370 Cuban doctors were serving in Italy.

The wealthy European principality of Andorra also reached an agreement with the Cuban government to combat COVID. Thus, in March 2020, a contingent of 39 professionals arrived in record time.

Surprisingly, by decree, the French government authorized 15 Cuban doctors to be deployed to Martinique, one of its Caribbean colonies, for three months to address the shortage of specialized medical personnel. In metropolitan France, people watched on television as the professionals were received with great hope. "For me, this is a victory, a great joy," expressed Senator Catherine Conconne, who fought for this initiative.

The vast majority of Europeans were perplexed by this unexpected and valuable medical contribution. This capacity for humanism and dedication was unknown, as the mainstream press has only repeated that Cuba is an island with a dictatorship that subjugates its people.

Cuba, nearly isolated politically and economically in the world by Washington's decision, sent its "white coat" brigades to 38 countries to combat COVID, always under government-to-government agreements, in several cases with the support of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The U.S. regime, which never offered alternatives, did everything possible to prevent these agreements, using blackmail, threats, and invoking implausible pretexts. While the world watched as the world's leading power lacked sufficient means to confront the epidemic, and over half a million people died due to a lack of minimal medical attention (even today, the virus claims an average of 350 deaths weekly in that country).

During these difficult moments for humanity, Donald Trump cruelly denied Cuba the possibility of acquiring oxygen tanks, which were extremely necessary to care for its affected citizens. Despite this, Cuba managed to create two vaccines, which it donated to resource-poor countries in several cases or sold at very modest prices.

This was not the first time Cuban medical brigades provided services abroad. During the fight against the Ebola epidemic, 2014-2016, primarily in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea Conakry, Cuban professionals played a leading role: nearly 200 doctors and nurses worked under WHO supervision. Notably, an incredible 15,000 healthcare workers had volunteered for this highly risky mission.

Since the dawn of this century, the "army of white coats," as some call them, organized into 28 brigades, has traveled to help alleviate the effects of 16 floods, eight hurricanes, eight earthquakes, and four epidemics. They have gone where no one else dares to go. Millions of women and men in the countryside, jungle, desert, or extreme cold have encountered a doctor for the first time.

This is attested to in Pakistan, Honduras, Haiti, Jamaica, Togo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea Conakry, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Barbados, Belize, Suriname... The list is long.

Between 2015 and 2018, the Cuban government deployed over 50,000 cooperatives (half of them doctors) to 68 countries. As of March 2025, there were 28,729 collaborators in 59 countries, some as socially and politically diverse as Saudi Arabia, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Qatar, Guatemala, China, Ethiopia, Gambia, Mongolia, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, Vietnam, or Zimbabwe. The agreements respond to the needs expressed by the governments requesting their services.

It is estimated that over 600,000 Cuban healthcare workers have completed such missions in 165 nations. The first was in Algeria, recently independent from France, in 1963.

Where the United States and Europe have sent troops, Cuba sends doctors. It has also shared the few medicines it has had, as happened with Haiti, for example. In many areas of this suffering nation, only Cuban doctors are permitted by the gangs.

Those who haven't seen it can search online for that terrible photograph of a naked girl running down a Vietnamese road, crying, her skin burned by U.S. army napalm bombings, which shocked the world terribly. It was in Havana that she, Kim Phuc, was treated. The United States had not cared about her or the millions it burned. Nor had its European accomplices. We must also remember that 19,000 children received care in Cuba after being affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. Neither Europe nor the United States was concerned about their health; the important thing was to launch a media campaign against the Soviet government.

During a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on AIDS in July 2001, Cuba offered "the doctors, pedagogues, psychologists, and other specialists required to advise and collaborate with AIDS prevention campaigns and other diseases." Also, the necessary equipment and diagnostic kits for basic AIDS prevention programs. And if the project were adopted, the Cuban delegation said, "it would only be necessary for the international community to provide the raw materials for the medicines. Cuba would not obtain any profit and would contribute the salaries of its personnel..." The proposal did not prosper. Surely, it did not suit the large pharmaceutical transnationals. At that time, the infection rate on the island was 0.09%, compared to 0.6% in the United States.

To this day, no government, private entity, or international organization has managed to structure a global medical program that provides an effective, large-scale response to those in need, as Cuba has done. It is an extensive network of international medical cooperation, with a deployment capacity that not even the World Health Organization (WHO) can ensure.

According to recent data, Cuba has more doctors than any European country: almost 8 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, while Greece has 6.3 doctors; Austria, 5.5 doctors; Norway, around 5.2; Spain, about 4.6; Italy has 4.25 doctors; France and England have about 3.4 doctors per thousand inhabitants. These are data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

And the regime that most attacks the Cuban political and health system, the United States, has only 2.5 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants. This implies that Cuba has approximately three times more doctors per inhabitant than the United States.

Marco Rubio Was Given Something to Occupy Himself With

And it is this wonderful and humane health system that the United States has dedicated itself to destroying since Bush Jr., although the Donald Trump regime has been doing it with viciousness. And for this, it has given free rein to its Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, as it seems he is not needed for other matters of international policy.

Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba due to the existing poverty before the revolution, was already on this path since he was a senator, following the wishes of the extreme right of Cuban origin in Florida. In that position, he became the main promoter of hardening the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba, architect of the "maximum pressure" policy during Trump's first government, which included reincorporating Cuba into the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

In January 2025, already as Secretary of State, Rubio announced without subtlety his intention to go after Cuba's international medical program. He reinforced the discourse he already had that it was "forced labor," "exploitation," that "enriches the corrupt" Cuban "regime." The program, he repeats and repeats, is not medical cooperation but an "abusive system" where the Cuban government charges the countries receiving these services and pays the doctors very little or nothing, being a "renting of doctors at high prices," almost "a form of modern slavery."

He has never mentioned that the money received by the Cuban government from other governments, in addition to paying the professionals as agreed, is also invested in maintaining the public health system.

Attacking the missions is also part of an agenda to weaken Cuba politically. Their expansion has been seen by Rubio, and he conveys it as such, as a threat to U.S. influence in regions of the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. To attack them, he uses "denunciations" of alleged violations of human and labor rights that justify punitive measures, not only for Cuba. The essential mission that Rubio has assumed is to discredit, destabilize, and put an end to one of the stars achieved by the Cuban revolution.

Learning from his boss Trump, a specialist in applying tariffs, Rubio began by threatening to revoke U.S. entry visas and impose sanctions on officials of countries that participate, or have participated, in these programs. Immediately, several leaders of countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) defended the hiring of these doctors as a crucial benefit for their countries.

At a joint press conference with Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness on March 26, 2025, Rubio was questioned about his stance, responding:

"We have no problem with medical assistance or with doctors, it's about compliance with international labor standards and the like."
He then repeated the same three well-known, and sadly defended, arguments. The Prime Minister, after telling him that the Cuban doctors have made up for the deficit in health personnel, expressed:

"We ensure they are treated in accordance with our labor laws and international standards." Rubio, not knowing what to do, had to say that "perhaps" in Jamaica the labor standards for Cubans "are different." He then returned to the charge:

"I think we can all agree that human trafficking, whether of doctors or agricultural workers (...) is an atrocious practice by the Cuban regime (...) But, in general, that is the problem with the program."
Apart from the discourse, threats, and demands, which he could probably repeat in his sleep, he did not speak of the alternatives he was asked for to supply the deficit of doctors. Oh, he was reminded that medical cooperation between Jamaica and Cuba is already 50 years old.

On June 3, 2025, Rubio announced visa restrictions, although without giving specific names, for senior officials of Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador who were, or are, linked to Cuban medical missions. The measure would also apply to members of their families.

On August 13, 2025, the State Department announced visa restrictions for officials of African countries, Brazil, and Grenada, a Caribbean island nation. "These measures promote accountability for those who support and perpetuate these exploitative practices," with Cuban doctors, the statement said.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressed his position on Cuba by defending the "Mais Medicos" (More Doctors) program:

"It is important for them to know that our relationship with Cuba is based on respect for a people who have been victims of an economic, commercial, and financial blockade for over 60 years."
Washington accuses Mozart Julio Tabosa Sales, secretary of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, and Alberto Kleiman, a former government official, of having played "a role in the planning and execution" of the medical program. The visas of the wife and daughter of Brazilian Health Minister Alexandre Padilha were also revoked. Tabosa and Kleiman worked in the Brazilian Ministry of Health under the mandate of former President Dilma Rousseff, when thousands of Cuban doctors were brought to the country to provide medical assistance in remote and impoverished areas. She emphasized that "the model of Cuban doctors is very humane, treating the disease not only as a problem but understanding the human being." Faced with the expulsion of the brigades by the then far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, Rousseff described the situation as a "national catastrophe" that would leave millions of Brazilians without primary care. And so it happened.

The State Department included former members of the Pan American Health Organization "for their complicity in the medical missions plan of the Cuban regime." "They used PAHO as an intermediary with the Cuban dictatorship to implement the program without complying with Brazilian constitutional requirements, evading U.S. sanctions against Cuba."

Rubio's office also indicated that some Mexican officials facilitated the presence of Cuban doctors since 2020 and that their visas would be withdrawn. This had been a decision of the then President López Obrador, due to the shortage of doctors "caused by neoliberal governments" and to cover the demand for care in remote or hard-to-reach places where Mexican professionals "do not want to go," the president would say at the time. In response, President Claudia Sheinbaum replied to the Secretary of State's statements about his warning to withdraw visas from those who promote these missions: "First, it is not forced labor." She added that the hiring is "legal, it is open, and it has no problem," asking the United States to have "collaboration, coordination, but not subordination. Mexico defines its foreign policy."

Among those "punished" by the State Department are Luz Elena González Escobar (Secretary of Energy), Oliva López Arellano (former Secretary of Health of Mexico City), Juan Antonio Ferrer Aguilar (former director of Insabi), and Jesús Antonio Garrido Ortigosa (former general director of Administration and Finance of Sedesa).

Around the same days, Dennis Cornwall, Minister of Finance of Grenada, lost all his U.S. visas, as did his ex-wife. He and several Grenadian leaders publicly declared in Parliament that they did not care about losing their U.S. visa.

For the moment, one country, the Bahamas, canceled agreements with Cuba for medical and teaching missions, which could be interpreted as an effect of Marco Rubio's pressure.

And yes, there have been Cuban professionals who have heeded the U.S. "advice," turned into siren songs, and have irregularly abandoned the missions. They would soon realize that it was all a ploy to damage the Cuban revolution and its humanitarian missions: in the countries where they were, they have not been allowed to practice since their diploma is not valid. And to do so, they would almost have to return to university. Those who manage to enter the United States, after innumerable sacrifices, encounter the same problem. Those who incited them receive them with closed arms and even with signs of annoyance: they have fulfilled their required function and are now simple migrants.

Meanwhile, the head of U.S. diplomacy, Marco Rubio, is already being seen as one of the many obsessed with the Cuban revolution from Miami. It is true that "little Marco," as Trump calls him, came from there. And Miami is considered the banana republic of the United States, due to the grotesque and violent attitude with which Cuban counterrevolutionaries practice politics. Perhaps that is why Trump gave him Cuba as a kind of bone to keep him busy and to harm the Cuban people. Or do you know of anything political or strategic, of global dimension, that he has done that merits his position?