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| Cuban doctors waiting to meet president Miguel Diaz-Canel after landing in Havana on the 23rd of November |
Thousands of
Cuban Doctors have begun to leave Brazil on the Cuban government’s orders after
comments from Brazil’s new far-right president Jair Bolsonaro prompted Cuba’s
government to terminate a cooperation agreement. Brazilian mayors have warned
that up to 30 million people are going to be left without healthcare.
Brazil’s
government is now scrambling to replace the 8300 vacancies, but this is proving
difficult, many of the Cuban doctors were working in remote or rural areas
where local doctors refused to work.
Healthcare is
Cuba’s most lucrative export, the ‘more doctors’ or ‘Mas Medicos’ program
operate in 67 countries and makes the country 11 billion dollars a year, in
2013, Cuba began sending doctors to Brazil under this program. However, after
Bolsonaro’s win, in a statement which the Cuban Health Ministry called “contemptuous
and threatening”, Bolsonaro stated that the four-year-old agreement between the
two countries and the World Health Organisation (WHO) could only continue if
doctors were allowed to bring their families and if the Cuban government
received none of their salaries. He also raised questions about the doctor’s
qualifications, saying that doctors should have to provide their medical
credentials by getting their diplomas validated in Brazil.
This
is an example of international conflict because it is a disagreement between
two different nation states. The two countries were once close but the
termination of this program signals the deterioration of relations between Cuba
and Brazil. In 2008 Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with
Fidel Castro to try and engage communist-run Cuba in increased trade and
investment and wanted to be the country to help Cuba with its transition from
Fidel Castro’s leadership to a new leader and, at the time the Brazilian
Foreign ministry stated that they wanted to; “provide the Cubans with a level of comfort in
the transition ahead by not being confrontational like the United States.”
Things have
certainly changed since then, now, instead of a president who admired Catro’s
1959 leftist revolution, Brazil has a president who has called Brazil’s
military dictatorship “glorious” and who an admirer of US President Donald
Trump.
Given the
political direction Brazil is taking and Bolsonaro’s confrontational ‘Trump
like’ diplomacy style, the future of Cuban and Brazilian relations looks bleak.
The cutting of the ‘more doctors’ program in Brazil could have disastrous
effects for Cuba as it is such as large part of the countries GDP.
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