Cuban doctors who participated in internationalist medical missions. Photo: MINSAP Cuba.
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde – May 8, 2025
In an exercise in diplomatic cynicism bordering on the grotesque, the US government accuses Cuba of “modern slavery” for its international medical cooperation, while practicing, in broad daylight and with apparent legal cover, brutal forms of institutionalized trafficking against Latin American migrants.
The paradox is not insignificant: while Cuban doctors save lives in the most impoverished regions of the planet, the Trump administration chains human beings hand and foot, ships them like cattle to third countries, and hands them over to disappear into the bowels of torture centers.
For decades, Cuba has maintained an unprecedented medical collaboration program, with more than 600,000 health workers in 165 countries.
These doctors have faced pandemics, hurricanes, famines, and humanitarian crises based on a principle described by Fidel Castro regarding Cuban collaboration in health: “In international relations, we practice our solidarity with deeds, not with fine words.”
But Washington, from Bush to Trump, has not stopped trying to discredit this model, accusing it of “human trafficking” and “forced labor,” when in reality what bothers them is that Cuba exports dignity, as defined by Kant: the German philosopher distinguished between what has a price and what has dignity. Things that can be replaced by something equivalent have a price, while things that transcend all price and admit no equivalent have dignity.
This contrasts sharply with what is happening north of the Rio Grande. The new Trump administration, determined to implement a “zero tolerance” immigration policy under supremacist parameters, has reactivated the mechanism of chain deportations without due process of law. Immigrants are deported without trial or opportunity to respond to the allegations against them.
They are expelled in shackles and handcuffs, crammed into planes that take them not necessarily to their country of origin, but to whatever country Washington designates as a “safe third country.”
The case of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador is particularly scandalous.
The Central American country, turned by Bukele into a drone-monitored dystopia, has offered the US government an infrastructure of repression without accountability: the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). A mega-prison where overcrowding, torture, disappearances, denial of due process and contact with family members are commonplace, according to human rights organizations. Thus, Washington outsources its migratory violence with lessons well learned from the Bush era: if detainees are outside the national territory, they have no rights before the US justice system. That was the doctrine for Guantanamo. Today, Trump is recycling it to deport and repress without judicial cost.
Meanwhile, the propaganda machine of the State Department and its media satellites in Miami repeat the mantra that “Cuban doctors are slaves.”
But where is the slavery? In the scalpel that operates on a child in Haiti for free? In the vaccine administered in Angola? Or in the chained hands of migrants fleeing violence in their home countries and ending up in a Salvadoran cell with no name and no lawyer? How is this situation any different from the disappeared in Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, or Chile during the dirty wars of the 1970s and 1980s?
The hypocrisy is not new, but it is more blatant. Accusing Cuba of what the US practices on an industrial scale is an old strategy: blaming the victim to hide one’s own crimes. The shackles with which migrants are deported cannot hide the true face of an empire that calls itself free and democratic, while reproducing, with new technology, the chains of the slave ships that continue to sail through the modern conscience of the West.
In Slave Ship (Capitán Swing, 2023), US historian Markus Rediker analyzes the Atlantic slave trade from the late 15th century to the end of the 19th century, a period spanning 400 years. “The compartments were so crowded that there was hardly room to turn around. The chains they wore to prevent any temptation to escape left their wrists, necks, and ankles raw.” Just like today.
Trumpism is the official absence of masks: there is an open bar of fascism, and those who cross the line are not kicked out of the party, but are put in charge of organizing another one, like this one blaming Cuba for “modern slavery,” while “slave ships” fly low from north to south, over our heads.
(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)
Rosa Miriam Elizalde
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist who was First Vice President of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), a founder of Cuba Debate and a writer of several books. She is also a regular contributor to La Jornada.
