The president of the Italian region of Calabria, Roberto Occhiuto, officially announced the signing of a agreement with the Government of Cuba for the export to that European country of half a thousand doctorswho will work in that southern region.
The official made the announcement via a video shared on their social networks, and among other details specified that professionals will arrive in that country as soon as next September.
“For months I have had a fruitful dialogue with the Cuban government. Cuban doctors have already helped Italia, in Lombardy and Piedmont, in the hardest months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, in Rome, at the Embassy of the Republic of Cuba in Italy, I signed a cooperation agreement with the Cuban Medical Services Marketer (CSMC) for the provision of medical and health services,” he said.
Según Occhiuto, Cubans will be used for at least three years “until all competitions are successfully completed” at local hospitals.
“The Caribbean Government can make 497 doctors with different specializations available to us. In September the experimental phase of this collaboration will begin and the first doctors will arrive, those who already know how to speak Italian will start and the others, before serving, will take intensive courses to learn our language quickly and well,” he added.
“We are satisfied with the signing of this important agreement, one more opportunity for Calabria, a concrete way to provide immediate responses to the needs of citizens, provide services properly, guarantee operational health facilities throughout the region and have hospitals in operation” , he pointed.
The regional president, a member of the right-wing party Fuerza Italia, also indicated that he had decided “in recent months to keep this delicate negotiation a secret because, meanwhile, other public and private institutions were persistently exploring the same path.”
“Health in our country is experiencing a paradox that I hope the future government can definitively resolve. Throughout Italy, including Calabria, health authorities are desperately looking for doctors to hire them for an indefinite period,” he added.
Ochiuto assured that in Calabria “the health care system at the moment has a lot of resources to hire. We made calls for open positions, expressions of interest, and they were deserted. We are working on a package of economic and career incentives to make our competitions more attractive.”
According to the local media New CalabriaIn order for the export business to become effective, the Medical Services Marketing Company of Havana, which collects the salary of the exported professionals and then pays them between 70 and 75% of that sum, must set up a branch with headquarters in Catanzaro. .
The signed agreement specifies that each contractor in the Calabrian region will pay that state entity a monthly fee of 3,500 euros for each professionalin quarterly payments.
Also, the contract says, the region agrees to pay “the monthly net lump sum of 1,200 euros to cover living expenses, Italy-Cuba travel expenses (two round trips per year) and accommodation expensesas well as those of complementary training and the examination carried out by the competent doctor identified by the Region of Calabria on the basis of the provisions in force on the matter in the territory of the Italian Republic”.
This would mean a total of 28 million euros per year earned by Havana.
The text of the agreement is limited to indicating that the contracted Cuban doctors will obey “in functional terms the directives of the heads of the structures of the host health bodies, committing to carry out their activities on the basis of the applicable standards, protocols and regulations in the territory of the Italian Republic”.
For its part, the CSMC is committed to “guaranteeing that Cuban health workers have the professional skills and adequate experience to carry out the health activities for which they are entitled.”
Participation in scheduled courses, paid for by the Region of Calabria, “is mandatory and constitutes a condition for the continuation of the professional relationship with the health worker,” adds the agreement.
Since Havana lost several markets for its exported professionals, with the closure of its large “missions” in countries such as Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, it has been looking for new destinations for its health workers. During 2020 and 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic allowed him to send groups for a short time to more than 20 countries, including Andorra and Italy.
In recent months, the business has restarted, one of the most lucrative for the Government, with the shipment of more than 500 toilets to Mexico and the imminent export of others to Honduras.
Human health and care services generated for the Government 3,997,948.3 of the 6,879,664.9 million pesos received in 2020 for the concept of exporting services. Health was exactly 58.1% of that total. Despite this, Havana insists that its “medical missions” are an expression of its “internationalist vocation” and part of the “humanist” purpose of the Revolution.
This, while the denunciations of doctors, nurses and other health specialists grow for the conditions of slavery to which they are subjected in the so-called “missions”.
Recently, the NGOs Prisoners Defenders (PD) and Outreach Aid to Americas denounced the violations of rights that the “medical missions” entail from Havana and called stop the forced separation to which thousands of Cuban families are subjected because of them. The Human Rights Foundation organization has also just published an exhaustive report on the practice of human trafficking by the Cuban regime in its medical missions program.
The violation of the human rights of Cuban doctors sent abroad has been widely documented and denounced. An investigation published by DIARIO DE CUBA in 2018 revealed worldwide the mechanisms used by the Cuban regime in the export of doctors to Brazil. Other more recent research from this same newspaper, in collaboration with the journalism organization CONNECTAS, obtained evidence of the modus operandi in other countries. From 2019 to today, PD has obtained more than 1,800 testimonies from victims describing working conditions of modern slavery in “missions” in 47 countries between 2002 and 2022.