By Francisco Acevedo
HAVANA TIMES – Even without confirming the news of the possible death of two Cuban doctors kidnapped four years ago in Kenya, the topic is a source of much discussion at all levels.
It is said that Assel Herrera and Landy Rodríguez were located in a known dangerous area and may have died as a result of a drone attack by the U.S. Africa Command on February 15th.
Herrera and Rodríguez were abducted by the terrorist group Al-Shabab on April 12, 2019, and upon learning the news, the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel ordered the relocation of the rest of its medical personnel who were in the red zones of Kenya. Here we already see a shadow, because it took the kidnapping of two collaborators for the Cuban government to recognize the danger of the area, something that anyone with common sense knew before sending them there.
The militia itself demanded at the time the payment of over a million dollars to release the doctors, but our dear Díaz-Canel refused. Official representatives went to visit them and confirmed that they were alive and willing to continue their mission, even if it wasn’t the one they were originally assigned.
A television report circulating on the internet highlighted that Dr. Herrera saw an average of 20 patients per day during his eight-hour shift in Mandera County, while Dr. Rodríguez performed about 10 surgical procedures.
Interviewed in the local television report, Rodríguez recounted that when he found out he would be sent to Mandera, he searched for information and learned that it was a dangerous place due to militia jihadist attacks.
The Revolution that cares so much for its children tolerated them continuing to work in those conditions, and since they continued to be paid their salary, perhaps even a little more suspiciously, there were no major problems either.
Note here that in trying to financially support their families, these doctors gave up vacationing for four years and continued to risk their lives in an area of constant armed conflict.
Last Tuesday, the President of the National Assembly of People’s Power (ANPP), Esteban Lazo, traveled to Kenya as a “special envoy” to “clarify” the alleged death of the two doctors, as detailed by the regime in an official note, but we’re still in the same situation.
After several days without even being able to confirm the deaths, it is evident that they were in no man’s land because neither the Kenyan government can reach there (in reality, the events occurred in Somalia, not in Kenya, but there are no official relations between Cuba and Somalia since the late 20th-century war), nor does Al-Shabab show much interest in clarifying the events because showing photos of the corpses would have sufficed, and they could even use that as a political weapon to say that they are killing civilians in attacks against them since they insisted a lot that the impact was on a house and not a military camp.
But at this moment, we’re not going to go into that, and we better focus on Cuba while the Parliament’s speaker continues his guided tour.
In the last decade, there have been constant reports of labor exploitation by the Cuban dictatorship of the doctors it sends abroad in agreements with different countries, and we’re not talking about war-torn nations anymore, but any country where practitioners must work in subhuman conditions many times, with payments much below their capacities, cannot move freely, or have relations with natives.
For example, the organization Prisoners Defenders based in Madrid tallies more than a thousand testimonies of professionals contracted abroad, 900 of them in protected witness status.
It’s not just doctors; there are also sports coaches, musicians, architects, sailors, and luxury cruise ship waiters, a way to export cheap labor.
According to official data, in 2018 the regime earned eight billion five hundred million dollars just from the export of medical services, which is probably the dictatorship’s most profitable business because it pays paltry wages and charges like the best, although these revenues are incapable of disguising the impoverished Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or moving away from the recurrent justification of the blockade to talk about the eternal crisis of the national economy.
Last month, the UN once again pointed to the Cuban regime for violations of the rights of exported workers, especially doctors, and warned that the governments of Italy, Qatar, and Spain could be considered accomplices to these sophisticated mechanisms of labor exploitation.
In the specific case of these doctors, it is evident that there was no interest whatsoever in Cuba in discussing the issue, and neither did officials from the Kenyan Embassy in Havana comment on it.
It seems evident that both specialists agreed to continue their mission despite the dangerous conditions, but the Communist Party of Cuba, which is unable to meet their basic needs, saw no problem in this.
There’s too much hypocrisy in this government, which takes advantage of the misery of its professionals to profit even in bellicose areas where their lives are in danger.
It wasn’t enough to send them to the jungles of Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Bolivia; with money at stake, they didn’t hesitate to send doctors to war zones as well.
It seems that in this case, we will have to wait for the United States, which does have relations with Somalia, to fully clarify what happened on February 15th, but regardless of the facts, very lamentable if they end with the death of the doctors, there are many shadows.
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