Versión Español
Slavery is the word used by the president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, to describe the working conditions of Cuban doctors in Brazil, given that the Cuban state keeps more than 75% of their salary. In response, the Cuban government, indignant, ordered the repatriation of the 11,000 doctors, of whom 3,000 will end up in Mexico.
As a campaign promise, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office on December 1, promised to improve the health system he considered “inefficient.” As a measure to address the problem, the Cuban doctors will arrive between December 3 and 4, after negotiations that have been under way since September.
To achieve this, the coordinator of advisors to the Mexican presidency, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, negotiated with members of the Workers’ Party (PT), who were in charge of setting up the “Máis Médicos” program in Brazil under the government of Dilma Roussef.
Cárdenas Batel is the grandson of the constitutionalist army general and president of the republic, Lázaro Cárdenas, who amended the Constitution so that Article 3 went from saying “education is free” to “education will be socialist.”
Likewise, his father, Cuahtémoc Cárdenas, maintained a friendship with Fidel Castro from the year he took office, and lamented his death as “a loss to the world.” Similarly, he considers it to be an “injustice” the prison sentence of Lula Da Silva, leader of the Workers’ Party, which arranged the doctor deal.
Although he denied it, the Cárdenas family facilitated the presence of Cubans in several public entities decades ago.
They are originally from the state of Michoacán, there Cárdenas Batel was governor for the PRD, a party affiliated with the Socialist International. Now, the Mexican left is negotiating to try to extract taxes from Mexicans to finance the Cuban regime at the expense of doctors.
As governor, 14 years ago, Cárdenas Batel, who studied at the Higher Institute of Art in Havana and married a Cuban, said “my relationship with Cuba is not the relationship of the government of Michoacán or any authority of Michoacán with Cuba.”
However, more than 400 Cuban officials served as advisers to the Michoacán government during his tenure, 50 Cuban professors took up positions in the Michoacán education secretariat for a literacy program implemented just for that purpose and he arranged for as many to be received in similar programs in that country, in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Tabasco.
According to an official who worked in the government of the Michoacan government of Cárdenas Batel, they were “programs tailored to the Cuban government.”
That is to say, “these collaborations until now had been in Mexican states, but they had never been considered a federal policy.”
But with AMLO this will change. Someone with a close relationship with the Cuban government will now grant them the opportunity to shape federal policy.
More than half a century of socialism in Cuba has been possible thanks to external financing. For decades it was the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, internationalist socialism was reorganized in Brazil with the Sao Paulo Forum whereby, with Fidel Castro in command, it was arranged that Lula Da Silva would head the project, and Venezuela would supply the project with its oil.
But after the crisis in Venezuela, which was consumed by the same economic system that sank Cuba, the island lost its biggest supplier. Added to that, with Bolsonaro in command, Cuba loses its influence in Brazilian affairs. Now Cuba is looking for a new host to infect, and Mexico appears to be the most likely victim.
For now it has guaranteed income for state coffers and diffusion of its state propaganda, via exploitation of its health workers, which has proved to be a more lucrative industry than tourism. In 2016, doctors produced USD $11.5 billion annually, while tourism earned USD $2.8 billion.
Under the auspices of the program, Cuban doctors are separated from their families, transported from one country to another, without the right to express their opinion and under the risk of persecution of their families in case of “deserting.”
Andrés Manuel López Obrador has not been in power for a week yet and is already forging alliances with a regime he has always supported.
Even when he passed away, AMLO referred to Fidel Castro as a giant.
