The individuals targeted, the State Department said in its official statement on the sanctions, stand accused of being “complicit” in “the Cuban regime’s medical mission scheme in which medical professionals are ‘rented’ by other countries at high prices and most of the revenue is kept by the Cuban authorities.”
“This scheme enriches the corrupt Cuban regime while depriving the Cuban people of essential medical care,” the State Department noted.
The visa restrictions, which will prevent the officials from entering America, is the fulfillment of a policy Secretary of State Marco Rubio affirmed in February, announcing an expansion of visa restrictions “directed at the linking of forced labor with the Cuban Worker Export Program.” The secretary of state explicitly listed foreign government officials outside of Cuba as eligible for such visa restrictions if they actively aided Cuba in selling doctors and other health workers to their countries as part of the Communist Party’s expansive forced labor scheme. The United Nations recognizes forced labor as one of several forms of modern-day slavery.
“Cuba’s programs to export workers, which include medical missions, enrich the Cuban regime and, in the case of Cuba’s medical missions abroad, deprive common Cuban citizens of the medical care they desperately need in their own country,” Rubio stated at the time. “The United States is dedicated to countering the practice of forced labor around the world.”
Speaking to Breitbart News on Wednesday, a senior State Department official affirmed, “The United States will not remain silent as the criminal Cuban regime unjustly enriches itself through its exploitative and coercive medical labor export scheme.”
“We will continue going after anyone responsible for or involved in the forced labor of Cuban doctors until their passports are not withheld by the regime and their wages are not stolen,” the official concluded.
The Cuban Communist Party has engaged for decades in what it euphemistically calls “international medical cooperation” — sending doctors and other health workers to friendly countries around the world to, according to the regime, fill a void in remote and impoverished areas with minimal access to basic health care. In reality — according to human rights organizations and the testimonies of health workers who escaped — Cuba sells its health workers as slaves who are barely paid to work in dangerous conditions and often weaponized to spread communist propaganda.
Some doctors have testified to “treating” fake patients and fabricating medical records to make the program appear more productive than it is, then destroying medications allegedly issued to the fake patients. Others have described being isolated from local populations and regularly threatened, including threats to family at home in Cuba, to prevent them from defecting. A large volume of evidence suggests that the host countries pay the Cuban government the money that should constitute the doctors’ salaries, only for the regime to pocket the money and give doctors a barely livable “stipend” that also prevents them from escaping.
The Organization of American States (OAS) condemned the Cuban slave doctor scheme as a form of human trafficking in 2019 at a conference organized to address the human rights crisis. The conference followed the revelation of extensive evidence compiled by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Prisoners Defenders and the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), the largest pro-democracy organization in Cuba, detailing the scope of the abuses of the program. The report, presented before the OAS, found tens of thousands of Cuban professionals — not limited to doctors, but including professors, engineers, athletes, musicians, and others — being sold out to foreign governments and subjected to “enslavement, persecution, and other inhuman acts.”
“We are talking about 50,000 to 100,000 professionals each year subjected to slavery by Cuba including doctors, but also teachers, intellectual artists, musicians,” Javier Larrondo, the president of Prisoners Defenders, noted at the time. “More than one hundred countries host these Cuban activities.”
Cuban law mandates that any doctor or other regime slave who defects from the “international solidarity” programs is banned from visiting Cuba for eight years. Those who defect and come home may face up to eight years in prison. Many of the doctors and other professionals recruited for the system have children in Cuba that survivors say the regime uses to extort them once abroad.
“In all this time, the Cuban authorities have not found a solution for the thousands of mothers who must split from their children to fulfill an ‘internationalist mission,’” the independent outlet Cubanet reported in April, sharing the stories of five Cuban women trapped in the programs.
“The reason for this is to maintain the family hostage on the island so that the professional is forced to return to Cuba and continue serving the system, says researcher Maria Werlau, executive director of the NGO Archivo Cuba, based in Miami, United States,” it noted.
Doctors have nonetheless defected and publicly testified to the abuses, sacrificing access to their homelands and families and potentially endangering those they love on the island. In 2019, four Cuban doctors spoke to reporters about their experiences at the State Department Foreign Press Center in New York, describing harrowing experiences of enslavement and abuse. The four doctors — Tatiana Carballo, Ramona Matos, Russela Rivero, and Fidel Cruz — worked in Latin America and are leading a lawsuit against the government of Brazil and the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) for helping broker their sale as slaves.
“They tell us often in Cuba that education is free, therefore we are their property,” Tatiana Carballo, who served in Belize, Venezuela, and Brazil, recalled at the time. “From the moment we graduate, we receive very, very low salaries, then begin medical missions abroad.”
Fidel Cruz, who worked in Venezuela, recalled that part of his job was to “tell patients about the positive things the Maduro regime was doing and influence the vote” in the country’s sham elections.
“All of us doctors in Venezuela had to give our bosses in state security a report over how many patients we took personally to vote and if they voted for Chávez or Maduro,” he noted.
Ramona Matos, who worked in Bolivia, recalled treating fake patients — fabricating the names of people that did not exist — and destroying the medicine prescribed to the fraudulent patient.
“When we arrived in Bolivia, as we were doing immigration, there was a state security agent there to take away our passports,” she said. “We were working in Bolivia undocumented; we had no document with our name on it, no passport, no piece of paper with our name on it.”
Cuban slave doctors are forced to work throughout Africa, including dangerous territories overrun by criminal gangs. In countries such as South Africa and Kenya, the program has attracted the outrage of local medical professionals, who have complained that the government has replaced them with Cuban slaves to avoid paying livable wages.
“Kenya has 1,000 doctors who are not employed. They have waited for deployment since May 2017. There are additional specialists who have been waiting for deployment to counties. Is there room for these Drs in Kenya?” Ouma Oluga, the secretary-general of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists’ Union (KMPDU), said in 2018, responding to the announcement of the country importing 100 Cuban doctors.
The next year, two Cuban doctors, surgeon Landy Rodríguez Hernández and general practitioner Assel Herrera Correa, disappeared from Mandera, Kenya, after the jihadist terror organization Al Shabaab attacked their transport vehicle on the way to the Mandera Hospital. The terrorists demanded a $1.5 million ransom, but neither Kenya nor Cuba acted to save them. Al Shabaab claimed that a U.S. drone strike killed the doctors in 2024, a claim that was never confirmed by any reputable party.
Reducing the scope of the Cuban slave doctor program has become a priority for the State Department during the second term of President Donald Trump. In addition to the sanctions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the program during a press conference in Jamaica with Prime Minister Andrew Holness, whose country purchases the slaves.
“The doctors are not paid. In many other parts of the world, the doctors are not paid,” Rubio explained. “The doctor — you pay the Cuban Government; the Cuban Government decides how much, if anything, to give them; they take away their passports; they basically operate as forced labor in many places.”
Rubio, who is Cuban-American, added, “It’s not that they’re Cuban doctors, it’s that the regime does not pay these doctors, takes away their passports, and basically it is in many ways forced labor. And that we cannot be in support of.”
Holness denied exploiting Cuban health workers despite importing them to address Jamaica’s health worker shortages.
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