Cuba: The finest health care system in the world

Cuba is said to be planning to send doctors to Paraguay as a means of earning foreign currency.

Reportedly 25 doctors from the municipality of Plaza of the Revolution have been assigned to work in Paraguay. Their absence will be covered by sixth year medical students.

In actual fact, Cuba's doctors are foreign exchange wage slaves farmed out to other countries, as this story also indicates.

Over the last 41 years, the Cuban government has sent tens of thousands of doctors to dozens of nations as part of its vaunted doctor diplomacy program. Some say it's evidence of the Castro government's unselfish commitment to health care. But others charge that doctor diplomacy is simply a way for Cuba to bring in desperately needed hard currency. The bulk of the money paid by the nations goes to the government, not the doctors, they say.

"These doctors are in essence slave labor. They're sold on the international market to fill a need in the Third World. But the net beneficiary is the Cuban regime," said Joe García, head of the Cuban American National Foundation, an influential anti-Castro group in Miami.
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Cuban officials estimate that their doctors have saved nearly 86,000 lives and forced a drop in Haiti's infant mortality rate.

Critics contend that Cuba exaggerates the success of doctor diplomacy.

They add that the program is unfair because the physicians earn only a small share of the millions of dollars that foreign governments pay Cuba for the medical services. Even so, many doctors are eager to take part.
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"Cuban life in general is so miserable that only Cuban professionals would think that it is a step up to practice medicine in Haiti, Zaire, Mozambique and other impoverished Third World nations," Mr. García said.

Sometimes doctors sent abroad seize the opportunity to defect. In one case in 2000, two Cuban doctors in Zimbabwe headed to a U.N. office in that country only to disappear and wind up in jail.

The doctors said local authorities had tried to force them onto a Havana-bound plane. They slipped a note to an Air France crew member, and the airline refused to board them. They spent a month in jail before the United Nations pressed for their release, allowing them to travel to the United States.

In the meantime, back in the communist paradise so beloved of Hollywood and media types, Cubans make do with medical students.