While Cuba is saving lives, the Anti-Cuban mafia is doing the opposite

In a few days, the UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) will strongly express its rejection to the US blockade on Cuba. However, anti-Cuban senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menéndez have submitted a bill to restore a migration programme encouraging Cuban doctors to, in their words, combat an allegedly “human trafficking” with which the Cuban government subjugates Cuban health personnel.

The proposal of these “humanitarian” characters is nothing new. Apparently, the goal is to reissue the so-called plan Cuban Medical Professional Parole (CMPP), which came into force back in 2006, drawn during Bush’s administration, to revive the defection of Cuban doctors.

Dead letter under Barack Obama’s administration (2009-2017), the CMPP, which paved the way for Cuban health personnel serving in foreign nations to request political asylum at any US embassy, eventually became another scam made by the anti-Cuban mafia based in Miami.

In April 2011, El Nuevo Herald stated: “Dozens of Cuban doctors encouraged to defect to the United States now face delays in obtaining green cards and citizenship because they joined the Communist Party or affiliated organizations in Cuba when they were young, according to South Florida immigration lawyers and immigrant rights activists. The delays are an unexpected problem for some of the doctors who had hoped to be received with open arms under a program launched by the Bush administration in 2006 as a way to undermine Cuba’s “doctor diplomacy,” a popular program under which thousands of doctors are deployed to foreign countries.”

At the same time, an AP newswire pointed out that “Cuban physicians who defected while on overseas assignments have confronted a frustrating contradiction in American medicine: They were allowed into the U.S. because they are doctors. But, once here, they cannot treat patients because Cuba has refused to release or certify their academic records.”

Nonetheless, the intents of Marco Rubio and Bob Menéndez, as in the past, are the same. If back in 2010 during the days of WikiLeaks’ scandal, a cable from the US Interest Section in Havana revealed that “the US diplomacy goal was to discredit, by all means, one of the greatest achievements of the Cuban Revolution, public health”; today, the goal is to strengthening, to its meanest expression, the genocidal US blockade on Cuba.

It is shameful that this new version of the CMPP is being taken into consideration amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which Cuba has endured despite the 243 measures imposed by the US government under Trump’s administration to siege our nation —with the advice of these two characters—, and all remain still in force under Joe Biden’s.

As our Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodríguez denounced in his Twitter profile: only between April 2019 and December 2020, the US blockade on Cuba caused US$9.157 billion in losses.

The website The Intercept pointed out just a few days ago that while the US government speaks about supporting world vaccination, sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela speak otherwise.

“While the Biden administration has pledged to lead international efforts to distribute vaccines around the world, economic restrictions on doing business with Cuba and Venezuela threaten to undermine that very promise,” warned the website.

Among these restrictions, we must highlight the inability to delivering an important donation consisting of a large shipment of mechanical lung ventilators, diagnosis kits, masks, and other medical supplies necessary to combat COVID-19, shipped by the Chinese company ALIBABA, which could not dock in Cuban soil.

As a sign of the US blockade extraterritoriality, the “new” proposal made by these anti-Cuban senators so “concerned” by the working conditions of Cuban doctors, not only affect human rights in Cuba, but also go against the life of dozens of thousands of people around the world.

According to figures obtained from the Ministry of Public Health in Cuba, in 60 years, 420.000 Cuban professionals have performed more than 14.5 million surgical procedures, helped delivering 4.470 million babies and saved 8.7 million lives in 150 countries. More than 30.407 health workers have assisted in 66 nations, divided into permanent medical brigades and others from the international contingent specialized in high-stress situations and serious epidemics, and the Caribbean nation sent nearly 57 medical brigades form its Henry Reeve contingent to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic across 40 countries.

While leaders worldwide urge for solidarity among nations as the sole solution to overcome the effects of the pandemic, those worshipping death in the US Congress reveal before the public opinion their moral lowness when insisting on defending one of the greatest political failures ever: the genocidal US blockade on Cuba.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff