José Manuel Suárez Villalobos, a surgeon with 28 years of service in the Cuban public health system and a resident of Camagüey, denounced that the regime is preventing him from leaving the country to reunite with his family.
"Until when do I have to suffer the punishment of having become a specialist doctor?" said the physician indignantly, expressing the feelings of many colleagues whom the regime keeps working in precarious conditions and without the possibility of leaving the island, journalist Javier Díaz published on Facebook this Tuesday.
The physician, who graduated from the University of Medical Sciences of Camagüey in 1996, went to Díaz in a gesture of despair so that the world knows about the violation of his freedoms, including the right to enter and leave his home country freely.
Suárez recounted that he worked on three internationalist missions for a salary of 20 USD per month, and sometimes less, as in Venezuela he earned 225 CUC monthly, which barely covered his basic needs.
"What I believe is that I have contributed to the country, and if I still owe something, it should not be a reason for such an unfair punishment," pointed out the specialist who is trapped on the island, seeing his loved ones, including children and grandchildren, only through a phone screen.
The doctor reported that on several occasions he has requested to be released from "the regulations or restrictions that prevent me from having a passport and traveling like any Cuban citizen, and it has been denied to me despite not being essential in my hospital or the municipality where I live."
However, the regime has ignored all of his demands and, instead, maintains the prohibition on traveling outside the island.
Finally, Suárez demanded justice and freedom, requesting that the international community, human rights organizations, and the UN become aware of his case and take action.
In 2022, when more than 12,000 doctors left the public health system of Cuba, the regime intensified control over these professionals, often sending them to other countries through the so-called missions or collaborations, which are nothing more than a system of modern slavery.
At that moment, the figures released by the National Office of Statistics and Information for the Public Health and Social Assistance sectors alerted that the decrease in staff has been generalized in the Health area and the number of inhabitants assigned to each doctor has increased.
At the end of 2022, there were 94,066 doctors on the island, while in 2021 there were 106,131, 12,065 fewer.
That situation motivated the Cuban government to further restrict the travel abroad of medical specialists, dentists, health technicians, and nursing graduates in 2023.
The decision was announced by Marcos del Risco del Río, Director of Human Capital at the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), during a video conference in which he asked for "discretion".
However, later on, the Ministry of Public Health clarified that "there is no migration regulation for specialist doctors in Comprehensive General Medicine, nor for newly graduated doctors"; a stance that corresponds with their desire to lease out the highest possible number of specialists to foreign countries.
Stomatologists and nurses also escape from that strict control.
However, there are constant complaints from Cuban specialist doctors, who go to the identity card offices to get their passports and are notified that they cannot do so because they are "regulated."
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