1,000 replacements for Cuban doctors in Brazil quit program

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

1,000 replacements for Cuban doctors in Brazil quit program

By ANNA JEAN KAISER
April 5, 2019

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — More than 1,000 Brazilian doctors who signed up to replace Cuban physicians working in Brazil’s rural areas have quit within three months, the health ministry confirmed Friday.

The doctors who quit represent 12% of the 8,500 physician positions that opened after Cuba’s government ended the More Medics program, which had sent Cuban doctors to areas where medical professionals were scarce in return for payments from Brazil.

Days after being elected Brazil’s president on Nov. 28, far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro said he would renegotiate the program, which had been signed between Brazil and Cuba in 2013. The Cuban government then announced its doctors would no longer participate.

Bolsonaro tweeted that the Cuban government rejected his new terms to require that Cuban doctors pass the Brazilian medical exam, receive the full salary the Brazilian government paid for their services and allow them to bring their families. The agreement had said Brazil’s foreign ministry could grant temporary visas to doctors’ family members, but Cuban doctors reported having problems in bringing their families to Brazil.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/fa25c6b5e9194fef9d0ba5b117d01d54

[Judi Lynn]

1. So now they realize Brazilian teachers bail if there isn't a huge incentive for them.

Cuba's program always separated the wheat from the chaff, in most cases.

Their system generally attracts people who go into medicine for righteous reasons: to help the human condition, to bring aid to those who need it, to help human beings bounce back from injury or illness, and to help prevent illness in the first place.

Cuba has been accepting US students from disadvantaged backgrounds all over the country, from the Desert Southwest, from ghettos in large cities, from immigrant camps in agricultural areas throughout orchards, and fields throughout the States. The children of poor people, who could never afford to go to school receive assistance in learning Spanish to create a foundation at the beginning, then all the classes needed to graduate, get their medical degrees, and they get this for NOTHING, just as do Cuban youth.

The agreement they sign, just like the agreement signed by Cuban young doctors, is to go to an area where they are needed, and work for a mutually agreed number of years immediately. This allows them to give back to the world the equivalent of the care and concern it took to train them: they pay off their moral, spiritual, economic debt for that which they have already received.

US American disadvantaged students have been applying for this chance to receive their education and to apply their education to helping human beings for years and years. Kids from the ghetto, kids from reservations, kids from immigrant camps who have traveled with their parents in seasonal work all take the chance and return to apply what they have learned in the environments they already know, among people who need their help.

"Slavery?" Only an idiot would see the pure ignorance in this claim.

Very few, proportionately, trained doctors have ever been selfish enough to take their educations and jump ship, going to the US to follow "the big bucks" instead. The US has tried feverishly for many years to seduce these young people and bring them here for the sheer propaganda value, just as they have always sent people to bag athletes, professional singers, dancers, you name it, when they travel abroad.

It could have been predicted Bolsonaro would leave the poor back in the hopeless world they had before Brazil's progressive President Lula started the practice of bringing help for Brazil's desperately poor people who had never had access to medical help before he was elected.

Anyone who has ever bothered to look for the truth would already know that.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Just remembered, there is an associated organization in the US which supports the Medical Program:

Cuba Caravan June 2019
IFCO/Pastors for Peace is happy to announce that the 30th edition of the Friendshipment Caravan will travel to Havana and Cienfuegos in June 2019! Check out our flyer & routes!



https://ifconews.org/cuba-caravan2018/



I have learned, over the years, there are many US supporters of this program who go regularly with these people, and their numbers include at least 2 people from D.U. who have made the trek at least once.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Interesting article written by a US medical student in Cuba during Pres. Obama's attempt to thaw

relations with Cuba, before the Crazy Orange Blob oozed its way into the Presidency:

Sweet home Havana: US citizens living in Cuba
By Graham Sowa On Jun 8, 2015



While hotels like Havana’s Melia Cohiba are full of Americans who think they are getting an early taste of international travel’s forbidden fruit hundreds of United States citizens have been calling Cuba home away from home for some time now.

Every morning US students studying at the University of Havana walk to classes, State Department diplomats and US Marines drive into the bustling Vedado neighborhood from restful Playa-Miramar, medical students from New York City, Oakland, and New Orleans make their rounds, US tour operators head out to the Jose Marti International Airport to pick up the latest bus full of their compatriots, and a few dozen United States exiles begin yet another day in Havana.

Even with the waxing and waning of bilateral relations over the decades there has never been a complete absence of US citizens on the island.

I showed up as part of the one of the more recent groups making Cuba a temporary home base, as a student of the Latin American School of Medicine. At any one time there are about 100 of us studying medicine here, split between a campus on the far western edge of the Havana and the more central Salvador Allende Hospital in the Cerro neighborhood.

More:
https://progresoweekly.us/sweet-home-havana-us-citizens-living-in-cuba/