Doctors for sale

It's no secret Cuba is in the business of exporting doctors and has been for the past decade. About 20,000 of them work in Latin America, mainly in Venezuela, in exchange for close to 100,000 barrels of oil a day from Hugo Chávez. It's business, but you could always find a humanitarian argument if you looked hard enough...

Now, however, there's no more beating around the bush. Cuba and Qatar cut a deal in Doha to staff an entire Qatari hospital with Cuban specialists. The deal is part of multi-million dollar negotiations about a joint venture hotel in Cuba between the Cuban government (which means the Army) and the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment, a state-run fund. Qatar is not a developing country with millions living in poverty. It has the highest GDP per person in the Arab world and most of the 900,000 inhabitants are migrant workers from South-Asia. It's hard to see this as anything but a cold commercial pact.

Doesn't Cuban have the right to with it's doctors as it likes? Freedom of labour is one thing, but this is something completely different. Exporting professionals as if they were cattle is a dubious business. For starters, in the case of the Cuban doctors, there families are forced to stay behind, as a safe guard against defection. Secondly, what does it mean for health care on the island itself?

In December 2006 I reported for the Dutch newspaper AD from Cuba on the scarcity of doctors and the way in which Venezuelans were flown-in and got preferential treatment. Meanwhile Cubans were lucky to be attended by med-students. I've seen no indication that that has changed. Moreover, deals like this are only more likely to drain the island of one of the few resources for which it receives international acclaim.



Cuban doctors working in a slum in Caracas, Venezuela (photo PIT)