Cuban doctors who participated in internationalist medical missions. Photo: MINSAP Cuba.
By Pablo Meriguet – Feb 27, 2025
The US Secretary of State promised sanctions to all those who collaborate with the program that has provided high quality healthcare to millions of impoverished people around the world.
When Marco Rubio was announced as Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, many expected that during his tenure he would launch attacks against the Cuban government in an attempt to undermine it and (if he got his way) overthrow it. The almost immediate reinstatement of Cuba to the shameful US list of state sponsors of terrorism (from which Biden had removed the Caribbean country at the end of his term) was an initial and forceful attack on a small glimmer of hope for the normalization of relations between the two countries.
On February 25, Marco Rubio announced that he was stepping up his anti-communist offensive against the Cuban people by trying to discourage countries from hiring Cuban doctors. This is not the first time Rubio has tried to destroy this program. Several years ago, Rubio already introduced a “Bill to Combat the Trafficking of Cuban Doctors” claiming that the Cuban program is a disguised form of forced labor.
Under the argument that Cuban doctors and other professionals are “exploited labor”, Rubio announced that anyone involved in exporting professional workers to other countries would suffer sanctions, such as visa restrictions and other measures. Rubio’s “move” aims to sanction diplomats, officials, and others involved, including their family members. This would apply to Cubans and non-Cubans.
This decision, which adds to a series of attacks by the Trump administration to destroy the Cuban Revolution, has been repudiated by the Cuban government. Bruno Rodríguez, Cuba’s Secretary of State, wrote, “Once again, Marco Rubio puts his personal agenda before the US interests. The suspension of visas associated to Cuba’s international medical cooperation is the seventh unjustified aggressive measure against our population within a month.”
For his part, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel posted on X “The US State Department should explain to the Americans and the international community to what extent the attack against Cuban medical services on which the health of millions of people in dozens of countries depends, is a credit to their country.”
What does the program of Cuban doctors outside Cuba consist of?
In 1963, Cuba sent its first internationalist medical mission to Algeria just after the nation won its independence from France in an arduous war which cost the life of some 1 million Algerians and saw the mass exodus of French people, including French professionals which staffed the majority of health centers. After meeting with the young nation’s head of state Ahmed Ben Bella, Fidel gave a speech at the inauguration of a new Medical School in Havana in 1962 and called on the Cuban people to support the mission:
“Most of the doctors in Algeria were French and many have left the country. There are four million more Algerians than Cubans and colonialism has left them with many diseases, but they have only a third — and even less — of the doctors we have…That’s why I told the students that we needed 50 doctors to volunteer to go to Algeria.”
“I’m sure there will be no shortage of volunteers…Today we can only send 50, but in 8 or 10 years’ time, who knows how many, and we will be helping our brothers…because the Revolution has the right to reap the rewards it has sown.”
Thus, Cuba inaugurated a program which today has seen some 400,000 medical professionals travel to over 160 countries across the world, supporting countries that do not have sufficient internal medical professionals to respond to the demands for general or specialized medical care for their population. In many cases, the Cuban doctors fill gaps in historically marginalized and underserved communities, be it in the rural Indigenous communities of Brazil, or poor neighborhoods in cities across the Global South. During the COVID-19 pandemic, dozens of brigades of Cuban health professionals, called the Henry Reeve Brigade, were sent to countries across the world, including Italy. Millions of people across the world have received high quality and free medical treatment thanks to the Cuban doctors.
The majority of the international medical missions are coordinated as standing state-to-state partnerships wherein governments pay the Cuban government for medical services.
Thanks to the advanced state of medical professionalization in the Caribbean, this has been one of the few strategies the country has had to obtain some income in the face of the unjust economic and commercial blockade that the United States imposes on Cuba with impunity. Likewise, Cuba also offers assistance, counseling, and other professional services in fields other than medicine.
Cuba currently offers this type of service to almost 60 countries around the world and since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, it has sent 600,000 professionals to more than 160 countries during its implementation. As of today, this is one of Cuba’s main sources of income (between 2011 and 2025 it is reported that revenue for this reason exceeded 11 billion dollars), so the decrease in income from professional services could mean a tremendous blow to the Caribbean island that is currently struggling against the historic sanctions unilaterally imposed by the US government.
