More Cuban doctors due in Brazil today

AFP

Brasilia

Some 3,000 more Cuban doctors are to arrive in Brazil from today to join a government programme to fill vacancies in the country’s public health system.

Authorities said the Cubans are due in four major cities: Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Fortaleza and Belo Horizonte. They are expected to be operational next month after undergoing a familiarisation course, the official Agencia Brasil quoted the health ministry as saying.

The Cubans will join 3,664 professionals currently enrolled in the “More Doctors” programme - 819 Brazilians and 2,845 foreigners — to serve the underserved population of 1,098 towns and 19 indigenous districts mainly in the country’s north and northeast.

The new arrivals will bring to more than 6,600 the number of doctors in the programme by the year end.

The government said it plans to meet demand for 12,996 physicians until next March.

The programme gives priority to Brazilian doctors for the three-year posts, but relies on foreigners where necessary.

Each foreign doctor is offered a monthly salary of $4,240 during the three-year contract.

In Cuba, they earn under $30 a month; Havana keeps most of the difference.

Medical service “exports” are a leading hard-currency earner for Communist Cuba. Brasilia has agreed to bring in 4,000 Cuban doctors and to send their wages to the Havana government through the Pan American Health Organisation.

According to Brazil’s health ministry, the country of more than 200mn people has a shortage of 54,000 doctors, particularly in poor urban and rural areas.

After massive nationwide street protests in June to demand better public health services, the government launched the “More Doctors” programme.

In August, a first batch of contracted Cuban doctors were booed and insulted by their mostly white Brazilian colleagues in a racially-tinged incident when they arrived in the northeastern state of Ceara.

The Cubans, many of them blacks, were slammed as “slaves” and “incompetent.” The incident touched off a furore on social media and led President Dilma Rousseff and the health minister slamming the xenophobic reaction.

“It is important to say that foreign doctors, not just Cubans, are coming here to work in areas where Brazilian doctors do not want to work,” Rousseff said at the time.

Brazilian doctors’ associations have criticised the plan to lure foreigners, insisting the problem was not a shortage of doctors but rather poor management and a lack of resources in the public health sector. Some also have voiced politically tinged concerns about Brazil co-operating with a non-democratic government, in their view, giving Cubans job opportunities instead of arranging for Brazilians to care for their own.