Cuba Brings 200 Doctors Home from Venezuela to Deal With the Desperate Situation in Ciego de Avila

The Minister of Health, José Ángel Portal Miranda, in the center, with a score of Cuban doctors recently returned from Venezuela. (PCC)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 4 August 2021 — Faced with the catastrophic panorama that Ciego de Ávila is experiencing due to the covid, the Government has sent for a ’mission’ Cuban doctors who were serving in Venezuela. About twenty of them arrived at the Jardines del Rey International Airport on Tuesday and were received by the Minister of Public Health, José Ángel Portal Miranda. On Wednesday, another large group is scheduled to land, about 200 in total.

“You have not come to supervise, you have come to mobilize, to put your heart to the complexity, you are going to find many problems, but we know that you have the capacity to solve them,” Portal Miranda told the newcomers.

When informing the doctors of the reception, the website of the Communist Party of Cuba does not hesitate to say that the province presents “a resounding mortality rate that is out of step with the national context.”

The same text specifies that the doctors, “who held management positions” in the mission, will join the health areas of the main municipality and the Antonio Luaces Iraola Provincial Hospital “to also implement a new protocol, designed from the current availabilities of drugs.”

“At the same time, they are tasked with better management of the human resource capacity so that, for example, in the hours of greater patient care, the consultations have more doctors and the wait is shortened,” the report continues.

In a short note, Radio Surco details that the doctors, originally from Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba, Holguín, Las Tunas, Villa Clara and Pinar del Río, gave up their vacations “to support this central province with the difficult epidemiological situation.”

It is the second time that the regime uses its international brigades to help in the internal crisis. At the beginning of July, some 200 Henry Reeve doctors and nurses joined the health centers of Matanzas, then the epicenter of the pandemic on the island.

Knowledgeable sources inform 14ymedio that they are gathering doctors abroad to tell them that, during their vacations, they will have to go to Cuba “because of the collapse of Healthcare” and “to calm the people.” In recent weeks, there has been criticism of the fact that thousands of doctors are serving abroad while there are no hands on the island.

However, the return of the brigades, the main source of foreign currency for Havana, is not on the horizon. “The mission will remain,” say the same sources. “They are not going to stop sending doctors to Venezuela.”

This Wednesday, 1,192 new cases of the coronavirus were reported in Ciego de Ávila, which is again in second place in number of infections, only behind Havana (1,445), which has four times the population, and followed by Cienfuegos (1,032).

The desperate situation made the Government send Deputy Prime Minister Jorge Luis Tapia Fonseca to the provincial hospital on Monday, which, the official press recognized, is in an extreme situation.

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