Bolsonaro against Cuban Doctors. Is he incoherent or cynical?

Our doctors have no need to prove anything. Cuban health assistance is already proven. There are witnesses and a long history of willingness, sacrifices, and lives saved from Africa to America, including the United States when the leader of the Cuban Revolution organized a medical brigade to assist the victims from Hurricane Katrina.

The newly-elected president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro talks about “dictatorships” in Cuba and Venezuela while going with the flow of coup-mongers and plotting against a legitimate government elected by the people of Brazil in crystal-clear processes held at the time, which had nothing to do with his own election surrounded by tricks and torn since the very beginning by the incarceration of Lula.

However, back in September 2016, when the rights of the Brazilian citizens to health care were on the negotiating table, Cuba never spoke of politics. Cuba just committed to maintain its collaboration under the contract terms and not the government in office.

“Cuba honored its word,” the spokeswoman of Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated. Our doctors remained in their posts even after Temer’s coup d’ ètat and “Cuban doctors never asked for political membership when assisting a patient. Cuban doctors never worried about the political membership of Brazilian authorities overseeing them,” MINREX points out.

So, who are the ones behind this political show? And why? The official statement confirms no members of the transition team has demanded the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba the interest of discussing the terms the ongoing assistance. Hence, the stance of our Ministry of Foreign Affair is pretty clear: “the purpose of the president is not to maintain the program, but to cancel it.”

Mr. Jair’s demands are that Cubans hired in Mais Medicos program must take an exam to give credit to their professional skills only to offer the job to those who immediately request political asylum. Are we talking about professional competences or political stances? What is the main concern of Brazil’s head of state: to lean on good doctors to serve his people or to follow the orders dictated by you-know-who?

In a sudden fit of “humanity”, Bolsonaro is worried about the families of Cuban doctors hired in Brazil. Did he forget his stance two years ago when he urged in Brazil’s Parliament to prohibit Cuban doctors’ families to settle down there? The strategy failed back then. Our doctors kept on traveling deep into the Amazon. It seems he realized that with or without the amendment he proposed, the solidarity of Cuba remained intact. Hence, he sought for more radical measures.

“Our doctors are more than doctors. They are human beings who heal people in need,” the spokeswoman of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlighted recently. And this has been proven after decades of international assistance. But this is too much for someone like Jair Bolsonaro who, by forgetting about history, has forgotten that of his own country.

Is he incoherent or cynical with the contradictions in the subject of the Cuban doctors? Or is it just a cruel miscue when he states that Brazil has never lived under a military dictatorship?

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff