Dear Editor,

The United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on February 25 the new visa restrictions against Cuban officials and their families. He alleges that the Cuban medical staff and teachers who participate in the international delegations active around the world are somehow “victims of forced labour”.

The USA knows what it is doing and why it is doing, no matter how off base the secretary, the product of Cuban exiles, may appear. It is another attempt to isolate Cuba for its principled internationalism in the face of US imperialism. The US is trying to tarnish the reputation of the health and education programme and force its closure. If the brigades of medical professionals were to be closed down it would directly and negatively impact health care for Jamaicans. It would mean less regular check-ups for pregnant women and longer wait times for cataract surgeries for the elderly.

It is for us in Jamaica to remember that:

•While the USA financed opposition groups in Venezuela, it was Cuban teachers and methods of teaching that supported Venezuela to become an “illiteracy-free territory” in two years.

•While the US supports the settler colonial regime of Israel with bombs, Cuba is training, completely free, the next generation of Palestinian doctors to look after their people.

•While the US arms and funds death squads in Nigeria and the Sahel, it is Cuban doctors who tend to the internally displaced and orphaned.

•Cuban doctors who sign up to these internationalist delegations provide health care to those who have never had access to a doctor and teachers who teach in literacy programmes to those who cannot read.

Haiti, Ghana, South Africa, Jamaica — Cuban brigades of teachers and doctors are present across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and even Europe. As of 2018, 400,000 Cuban doctors, nurses, and other professionals had worked in 164 countries. To our dear sisters and brothers in Haiti, Cubans have been the foundation of medical care. In 2004, 600 Cuban medical staff served 75 per cent of Haiti’s population. And between 1999 and 2010, 544 Haitians were trained as doctors by Cuba.

Today, in Jamaica, there are close to 400 medical personnel, including 72 doctors, who work to support the Jamaican health-care system as they have been doing as part of Cuban medical brigades to the island for the past 60 years.

With the Jamaican medical system already understaffed and Cubans working in specialised areas, such as ophthalmology, the Andrew Holness Government must come out and do as the governments of Trinidad and Tobago and St Vincent and the Grenadines have done and defend the brigades. Silence from the Government in cowardice risks negatively impacting the lives of thousands of Jamaicans. It must come out publicly and not only defend the brigades but Cuba’s right to exist without attempts by the US to tarnish its reputation.

The six-decade-long sanctions and more recent listing of Cuba as a State sponsor of terrorism have cost Cuba greatly, and yet it continues to show that is a true friend of the Global South, sending doctors and teachers as a concrete expression of proletarian internationalism.

Alexander Scott

alexanderwjscott90@gmail.com