“Without the possibility of buying a house,” the doctors believe that the State is not repaying them for their sacrifice
14ymedio, Madrid, 19 September 2024 — As if it were not enough to permanently retain more than 70% of the salaries of doctors on international “missions,” Cuban banks have denied two doctors who worked in Angola the extraction of the hard currency coming to them. The information was published this week by the official press itself, to which the couple appealed in a last attempt to obtain what is theirs.
“Acknowledgement of receipt,” a section of the newspaper Juventud Rebelde dedicated to publishing the population’s complaints, was the recipient of the claim of the married couple Eliannys Saborit Oliva and Alfredo Miguel Ramos, an anesthesiologist and an orthopedist, who live in the municipality of Bayamo, in Granma province.
After their return from Angola in 2023, where they spent three years as part of one of the health contingents that Cuba exports to many countries, the doctors earned an undisclosed amount of foreign currency for the State that was to be paid to them “after a reasonable time.” However, the Banco Popular de Ahorro de Bayamo has not paid the doctors since October 2023, claiming low availability of foreign currency.
The Banco Popular de Ahorro de Bayamo has not paid the doctors since October 2023, claiming low availability of foreign currency
Saborit Oliva and Miguel Ramos, who say they need the money to become independent, have run out of options, because as residents of Granma they can collect foreign currency only in that province. Meanwhile, their colleagues from other territories received their salaries long ago.
“Nor do they plan strategies for sending monetary aid, after almost a year of waiting to extract the cash in hard currency that is ours for having made money for the country, for representing our nation with dignity and for surgically saving lives, in adverse conditions of tuberculosis, hepatitis, HIV, malaria and Covid-19, with the sacrifice of abandoning our daughter and the rest of the family,” says the couple, who do not see their efforts being repaid.
“We have made three trips to Havana, with letters from the Council of Ministers, and the matter was transferred to the Central Bank of Cuba, which has the same answer: there is no availability,” say the doctors. They explain that they still “don’t have the money, after several complaints processed at the central banking level, without a date for delivery and without the possibility of buying a house.”
“The low availability is real, but we can’t understand, after almost one year, why they haven’t been able to resolve our demand,” the couple concludes, in their underlying criticism of the Cuban banking system.
Health workers are obliged to deposit the hard currency obtained during their missions abroad in Cuban banks, a policy implemented to try to avoid the desertion abroad of these professionals
Health workers are obliged to deposit the hard currency obtained during their missions abroad in Cuban banks, a policy implemented to try to avoid the desertion of these professionals. If they leave the mission, the health workers lose their wages, which pass to the State coffers.
This aspect of medical missions, as well as the withholding by the State of between 70% and 95% of the amounts paid by other countries for each Cuban health worker, has been pointed out by several organizations as a form of modern slavery.
Some of the health workers have even broken their silence and complained that the part of the money that Cuba leaves them to live on while they are on a mission is barely enough for basic needs. In 2023, one of the doctors of the more than 600 sent to Mexico that year told the newspaper Reforma that instead of a salary, he and his colleagues received a “stipend.” His salary, he added, minus the percentage taken by the regime, was in Cuba.
For its part, despite having a devastated health system – where there is a lack of supplies and medicines for the professionals themselves – Cuba insists that part of the money that other countries pay for Cuban doctors is reinvested in the Public Health sector of the Island.
“Doing away with this income means preventing Cuba from buying or manufacturing medicines, repairing hospitals, importing medical technology or, simply, the economic improvement of cooperating personnel and their families,” claimed Cubainformacción, a pro-Castro portal based in Spain, last February. The truth is that, as the Government of Cuba itself reports, more than 33% of the State budget goes to investments in tourism. This is reflected in the public accounts of 2023, where it is stated that the Health sector receives less than 2% of the State budget.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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