Brazil Says it has Replaced Nearly All Outgoing Cuban Doctors
HAVANA TIMES – Brazil has replaced nearly all of the thousands of Cuban doctors whom Havana has been pulling out of the country following the election of right-winger Jair Bolsonaro as president, the Health Ministry announced Monday.
Already, “97.2 per cent of the posts … have been taken,” the statement said. “8,278 professionals have already been placed in municipalities to start working immediately.”
No explanation has been given why the Brazilian doctors didn’t apply or weren’t hired in the first place when the Mais Medicos (More Doctors) program began in 2013. It was that supposed lack of interest in working in remote and poor communities that led to the contracting of the Cubans.
Former army captain Bolsonaro won the presidential election on October 28th and will be sworn in on January 1, 2019.
He has accused Cuba of exploiting the doctors by paying them only a small portion of what Brazil was paying for their services under a cooperation agreement.
Havana announced the withdrawal of the doctors in mid-November, accusing Bolsonaro of questioning their qualifications.
Cuba had been sending doctors to Brazil since 2013, when leftist Dilma Rousseff was president.
The Brazilian government paid US $3,500 dollars a month for each doctor, but the MDs received only 900 dollars because the Cuban government kept the rest, saying the funds went into the public health system.
The withdrawal of the doctors sparked concern that it would leave many poorer Brazilians without health care, but now that appears not to be the case.
I think Raul that you make the error of assuming that other governments of capitalist countries are like the communist regime in Cuba where the Communist Party of Cuba has a well funded Department of Propaganda, and the National Socialist Party of Germany where Dr. “totalGoebbels was in charge of propaganda. Those in Cuba who favour free speech with freedom of the press have been – as you put it – crushed, murdered and rather than disappeared, exiled. The Cuban communist government under the agreement made with Dilma Rouseff (original name Roussev – Roumanian)) was paid $3,500 US per month for each doctor. So unless the Government of Brazil is paying more than that, your comment is worthless. Have you any evidence of “secretly paid huge amounts” or is that innuendo? If you want an example of “total control over the media” you can again look at Cuba where the Castro regime does exactly that!
I note with a degree of amusement your comment about “bourgeois doctors” just as Fidel Castro said of those who led the revolution in Czechoslovakia against the USSR that they allowed “the establishment of a form of a bourgeois form of freedom of the press.” For communists anything that reflects open democracy is anathema, but the people of Brazil in open election, chose their government. The Castro regime has never faced open free elections. if it had it would not be in power!
This is a politically motivated move coming all the way from the government of the United Snakes of Amerikkka.
One can almost see how this scenario will play out. Pettit bourgeois doctors will at first be secretly paid huge amounts of wages in order to make the right wing seem honest, then later when they (doctors) will realize that they cannot handle the amount of failed, ignored and poor patients, and will take flight back to their air conditioned offices, and by then the right wing will have total control over the media which will support it and claim that it’s health plan was a huge success. This is how the chosen right wing bourgeoise operates under an incoming right wing regime, and once it consolidates its power, many people who will oppose it will be crushed, murdered, disappeared- Next stop- State of siege…….