CUBA: Caribbean PMs’ silence—yet loud on slavery

It’s a hard contradiction to miss. The same politicians and commentators who rightly thunder about the evils of slavery are often the ones defending, excusing, or quietly enabling the continued use of Cuban medical missions​, arrangements that credible observers have repeatedly described as coercive.

Reports from the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, alongside a 2017 investigative piece in The New York Times, have raised serious concerns about the government-to-government contracts under which Cuban doctors are deployed. The central allegation is not merely “poor pay” or “unfair terms,” but forced labour: a system structured so that the worker’s consent is compromised and their freedom constrained.

Under these agreements, host governments do not pay doctors directly. Payments are routed to the Cuban state, which then allocates a small fraction to the doctors themselves​, sometimes reported as around 5% to 25%​, with the remainder retained by the government. Accommodation and logistics are often controlled in ways critics say double as monitoring, limiting privacy and independence.

More troubling are allegations that doctors cannot freely decline assignments or speak openly once abroad. Accounts describe pressure applied through family members back home, with severe penalties for disobedience​, ranging from professional punishment to criminal sanctions under Cuban law. The message, as framed by critics, is simple: comply, stay silent, and do not associate with people or views deemed hostile to the regime.​ Most are accommodated in Morvant; in T&T, it's an area that is crime-infested and a stronghold of the PNM.

None of this information is hidden. Yet in parts of the Caribbean it is too often waved away as capitalist propaganda, as if the source of the criticism automatically erases the substance of the claims. Perhaps some reporting is coloured by politics. But it is also true that repression is not an unfamiliar feature of authoritarian systems, including communist ones​, and dismissing the evidence without serious scrutiny looks less like skepticism and more like convenience.

If Caribbean leaders want to honour their stated principles, they cannot be selective about whose exploitation counts. You cannot condemn slavery in grand speeches while tolerating labour arrangements that rely on state control, confiscated wages, and punitive threats. If these allegations are accurate​, and multiple reputable bodies suggest they are​, then continuing such contracts does not just “help healthcare.” It makes Caribbean governments complicit in a modern form of coerced labour.

T&T Newsday

@sgtdjones

Boudoom! Keep unleashing Lennox Lewis' wicked left hook. 😜

@sgtdjones

Once again, right on point my friend. The Cuban students that studied in Eastern Europe were monitored like a hawk. And during the summer break, they were on lockdown and remained in their dorm. They were not allowed to travel.

@BeatDball

@CricSham

Notice how the pan-Africans are avoiding this thread...

"The doctors are sent to Trinidad, and couples are separated. No husband and wife can come together at the same time.

“We have to pay the Cuban Embassy in US dollars to bring these doctors in. They (doctors) don’t get paid; they get a stipend. So really and truly, when you look at it, it’s a political abuse of these people. Trump is not wrong, but I never looked at it in that ­manner ”.

“Doctors were human trafficked, their wages garnished, and subjected to inhumane conditions amounting to modern-day slavery." The Cuban regime’s “medical missions” program, which has benefited several Caribbean countries, “relies on coercion and abuse." Cuban medical workers face withheld wages, confiscated passports, forced family separation and exile, restriction of movement through curfews and surveillance, intimidation and threats

They are not concerned about working conditions of Cuban medical professionals, which is akin to slavery.

Their countries benefit.

Cuba collects, according to research, 5 to 6 US billion dollars for such services; its citizens on the front line get a mere pittance of what is collected.

I noted that they live in Morvant in T&T; during my visit, I spoke to a few of the nurses. They walk to work at the POS hospital. They have tight restrictions and are supervised by Cuban security.

I have factual information from Cuban medical personnel walking by who saw a relative, stopped, and looked at the knee of a 70-year-old and told her to visit him at the hospital. She did, and the knee replacement was done within two weeks... She was told the waiting time is two years in T&T.

I spoke to 3 Cubans in T&T who confided more than the above. I have been to Cuba; they are not free. There are restrictions on where tourists can travel in Cuba.

We saw what happened when West Indian players' salaries were cut in India.

@CricSham

@CricSham

@CricSham

Where would they get funds to travel?

@sgtdjones

Not totally factual, for one, MOH goes to Cuba to recruit, not the Cuban gov dictating who comes to Jamaica.

A doctor in Cuba makes US$700 per year, taxi operators make more money.

@camos

A doctor in Cuba makes US$700 per year, taxi operators make more money.

I was told by a Cuban doctor domestic salaries are extremely low, with the highest-paid doctors earning roughly $70 USD a month. T&T doctors earn from 4,000 to 8,000 USD per month.

I never mentioned the process of recruitment. This thread is just about their confinement, payments, and similarity to slavery.

The Cuban specialists I saw walking to POS hospital were in their 60s.The nurses were in their late 50s.

Where would they get funds to travel?

They were not allowed to go to the beaches in T&T unless approved and supervised. Even if they had bus fare, they were not allowed to visit other towns in T&T.

I offered to take the doctor and nurses that operated on a family member to Maracas Beach on a weekend. They politely declined; they were not allowed.

You have to be a real idiot and low IQ person to compare Slavery to any form of employment in which the worker receives money.

You would also be disrespecting your ancestors who had to live in slavery... that is if any of your ancestors were slaves.

Yes the Cuban doctors had to give a lot of their pay to the State..but the deal of working in the Caribbean was still better for them and their own families, than just working in Cuba.

@Trex

The doctors do not get a salary, or ‘pay’ as you call it. That’s a misrepresentation of the term.

More correctly, it’s a Stipend… ‘walking around money’, and based on the restrictions applied to them by the Cuban government; even that pittance cannot be spent wherever they like.

And then you want to claim that being in another Caribbean island, under those conditions, is better for them and their family than being in their homeland. That’s very demeaning. Degrading too.

@Trex

I keep coming back to how easy it is for people to speak in clean, comfortable abstractions when the arrangement benefits them. “It’s employment; they’re paid, end of story.” That kind of framing is tidy, moralizing, and, if you’ve actually spoken to Cuban doctors on these missions, wildly incomplete.

I have spoken to them. I’ve seen the conditions they’re expected to live in and the rules wrapped around their daily lives. This isn’t simply a case of professionals accepting a contract, collecting a wage, and enjoying the ordinary freedoms that usually come with working abroad. Many describe something much tighter: restrictions on where they can go, who they can mix with, and how freely they can move within the host country. In some postings they are not meant to have much dealing with the local population beyond what the job requires. Their movements are monitored. Cuban security can be present and involved. And if they step outside the boundaries, if they violate the rules, they’re not merely “disciplined” in the way a normal employer might discipline a worker. They can be abruptly shipped back home, with consequences that follow them long after the flight lands.

That’s the context people conveniently skip when they scoff at comparisons to coercive labour. It’s not about pretending that every historical detail of chattel slavery maps neatly onto a 21st-century medical brigade. It doesn’t. No one is claiming these doctors are bought and sold at auction. The point is the controlling architecture: the limits on autonomy, the surveillance, the threat of punishment, the separation of families as policy, the inability of married couples to be stationed together in the same country. Those are not minor “HR policies.” They’re mechanisms of control. They exist for a reason.

And then there’s the money, because money is always where the story gets evasive. Host governments pay billions for these services. I cited figures in the range of five to six billion U.S. dollars. Meanwhile, the professionals doing the work, highly trained doctors, receive wages that are small enough to be insulting when set against what the host country pays and what comparable specialists earn in places like Trinidad and Tobago. The wage gap isn’t merely “different economic systems.” It’s part of the leverage. When your domestic salary is crushed to the floor, the overseas mission stops being a simple career choice and starts looking like the only way to breathe financially. That doesn’t make the doctor immoral for going. It makes the arrangement more coercive, not less.

Some defenders respond with a single, blunt line: if you receive money, it can’t be slavery. But that’s not a serious argument; it’s a semantic dodge. Payment does not automatically cancel coercion. A person can be paid and still be controlled through surveillance, restricted movement, confiscated opportunities, threats of repatriation, professional retaliation, and fear of consequences back home. If the worker’s practical freedom is tightly constrained, and the state extracts the bulk of the value while enforcing compliance through punishment, then we are no longer talking about ordinary employment in any meaningful sense. We are talking about a system that treats people as instruments of revenue and diplomacy first and as autonomous professionals second.

What makes the smug dismissal especially galling is the casual cruelty of it. To respond to this reality, these restrictions, these family separations, these monitored movements, and this disproportionate wage capture with “you have to be a real idiot and low-IQ person” aren't just rude. It’s a way of refusing to look. It’s an attempt to shut down moral discomfort by insulting the person raising it. It avoids the actual question: would the person making that dismissal accept those conditions for themselves? Would they accept being told where to live, when to leave, who to speak to, and that stepping out of line means being sent home and punished? Most people wouldn’t. They only find it easy to normalize when it’s happening to someone else, especially someone they’ve already decided is a political symbol rather than a human being.

So no, this isn’t a childish comparison. It’s a critique of a system that can dress itself up as humanitarian while operating with the logic of control and extraction. Call it exploitation, call it coercive labour, call it state-managed servitude, choose the term you think is most precise. But don’t pretend the restrictions are imaginary, don’t pretend the wage capture is irrelevant, and don’t hide behind insults when someone points out what these missions can look like on the ground. If we’re going to talk about dignity and labour in the 21st century, we should have the courage to look at the arrangement as it is, not as we wish it were.

Sarge

@Elsie

 This thread is just about their confinement, payments, and similarity to slavery.

I posted this above his rebuttal.

I view coercive labour as slavery in the 21st century.

Coerced labor, or forced labor, is defined by the ILO as any involuntary work or service exacted under the menace of a penalty. It includes slavery, human trafficking, and debt bondage, often found in industries like agriculture, fishing, domestic work, and manufacturing. Despite being illegal, it persists globally, with millions affected, including through prison labor in some nations

@Elsie

I know two Cuban doctors one in Jamaica and the other in Cuba, the one in Jamaica has gone to visit Jamaican relatives outside of Kingston, spent about 10 years in Ja and went back to Cuba several times.

@camos

They were not allowed to go to the beaches in T&T unless approved

He got approval for such travel, camos.

@Trex

You have to be a real idiot and low IQ person

it is interesting that when we know our argument is weak we rush to bolster it with personal insults

The Indians are so easy to spot. Anyone comparing Cubans to CHATTEL SLAVERY is an IDIOT and clearly NEVER descended from such. The ease with which you align yourselves with white Western narratives & supremacy would make a fascinating case study as to WHY so many of aspire to being adjacent to whiteness. It is disturbing atp