More Cuban Doctors to Venezuela: From Modern Slaves to “Strikebreakers”

Cuban doctors before leaving on an international mission (Reuters)

Cubanet, Miriam Celaya, West Palm Beach, 24 July 2018 — In Venezuela, while hundreds of health workers have been out on the street on strike for a month in demand for decent wages and better working conditions, the official Cuban media have just announced the immediate delivery of 62 Cuban doctors, recently graduated from the University of Medical Sciences of Havana (UCMH), who will provide free services in popular areas of that South American country as part of the Barrio Adentro Mission.

The labor dispute taking place between health personnel and the government of Venezuela was initially promoted by the nurses’ guild, but doctors, lab technicians, service employees and administrative staff of several public hospitals have quickly joined, without receiving any satisfactory response from the president, Nicolás Maduro, despite the demonstrators’ requests for dialogue, and their current intention to join forces with workers of other public companies, also on strike for similar reasons.

In addition to the demands for wage increases, there are also complaints about the shortage of medicines, the poor state of hospital facilities and the collapse of the infrastructure that impedes adequate treatment for patients with serious and/or chronic diseases. It also prevents guaranteeing an adequate diet for patients who require admission and surgery. In fact, the capacity for hospitalization or surgical interventions is, at present, minimal, as various medical, humanitarian, religious and Human Rights institutions have been reporting for a long time.

Paradoxically, in a country where, according to Decree #8.938 of April 30, 2012, “with rank, value and force of Organic Labor Law, Male and Female Workers” (LOTTT) promulgated by the then President, Hugo Chávez, and published in the Extraordinary Official Gazette #6.076 of May 7, 2012, workers’ right to strike is acknowledged, and replacement by others to occupy their posts is expressly prohibited, so it is outrageous that the leader himself is allowed to royally violate his country’s legislation.

Thus, instead of facing the situation and responding to his own workers, the Executive simply replaces them, sub-hiring through his buddy the Cuban president, 62 inexperienced Cuban physicians who will perform as so many others of their countrymen’s shamans, modern slaves who have preceded them or who continue to serve as voluntary captives of both governments. It is highly unlikely that these new villains can solve any problem in the critical health picture in Venezuela, but at least they will help Mr. Maduro show his care for the poorer of those he governs, and for Mr. Díaz-Canel to justify the continuity of the already dwindling deliveries of oil to Cuba.

And all this despite the fact that just three months ago, on April 30, 2018, the official Telesur press monopoly published, at full speed, a triumphant headline that read: “Venezuelans have been protected by Labor Law for six years.” And then iy offered a laudatory text to celebrate the prodigious social advances achieved in a six-year period through LOTT, “a legal tool worthy of the revolutionary process of transition to socialism that Venezuela is experiencing,” as expressed in April 2012 by Hugo Chávez when he promulgated said Decree-Law, whose regulations were later signed by Nicolás Maduro as head of state to wash his… hands with him.

Thus, without any disguise or embarrassment, the Caracas-Havana conspiracy claimed the prerogative of desecrating, in a single haul, the Venezuelan labor law and the supposedly sacrosanct words and drive of one who considered himself Bolívar’s spiritual heir, a visionary who had hallucinations of “socialism, XXI Century style” and one who, once “planted” at the Cuartel de la Montaña and evidently no longer able to transmute into the little bird adviser* to his disadvantaged pupil, Nicolás Maduro, remains the same as the ashes of his master, Castro I, only for the permanent symbolic evocation that “legitimizes” the continuity of the chaos in their respective countries.

With the rampant shamelessness of those who feel immune, the duet Maduro-Díaz Canel has just set aside Article 489 of the LOTT, which stipulates “the protection of the exercise of the right to strike” and establishes the ban on the contracting of other workers “to carry out the work of those who participate in the strike.” For further derision, the same article adds that “Workers during the exercise of their right to strike shall be protected from trade union immunity under this Law …” And all this contempt to what has been legislated is done by invoking the medical assistance program in exchange for oil – euphemistically called “Mission Barrio Adentro” – promoted in 2003 by the then presidents Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro.

It’s just a matter of time before we see how many of these new instant doctors, hastily trained in courses taken after mass registration, are more proficient in serving the interests of the regime and its allies than in conscientiously performing the altruistic work that would correspond to a profession destined to save lives and alleviate human suffering, and who will most likely end up “defecting” from the “mission” and reaching their true goal: escaping to freedom. At least such is the dream that many of them secretly cherish, while out loud, and before a flag so often defiled, they solemnly swear “to defend the revolution and the conquests of socialism” wherever duty calls.

And, if at the end of all the farce the very sacred “mission” ends in the Yuma*, that would be better still. For, after all, it seems that in many cases, the end does justify the means.

Translated by Norma Whiting

Translator’s notes:
* Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has claimed that deceased president Hugo Chavez appears to him as a little bird and advises him. On announcing this he reproduced the tweeting noises he hears from Chavez .
**”La Yuma” is Cuban street lingo for the United States