Havana, Cuba.- After Cuba”s decision to withdraw its doctors from Brazil, they leave that country with their heads held high and the satisfaction of fulfilling their work with dedication and consecration, affirmed here on Thursday deputy Estela Cristina Luna.
Prensa Latina spoke with the president of the Health and Sports Commission of the National Assembly of People’s Power, about the announcement on Wednesday of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health on not to continue participating in the More Doctors program, in view of conditions and threats from the President-elect Jair Bolsonaro.
It is a position of principles, with which the Cuban Revolution does not negotiate, therefore our well-argued decision deserves our full support, said the parliamentarian and specialist in Comprehensive General Medicine as a Second Degree, Master in Primary Health Care and assistant professor from the University of Medical Sciences.
Luna headed the brigade of doctors from Cuba in Brazil since August 2013, when the program was activated, until last February, so -she assures- she knows exactly what the Cuban presence has represented in an initiative devised by the then President Dilma Rousseff to serve the most disadvantaged communities.
Our doctors will be ready at the moment they are told to withdraw and they will do it with their heads held high, because they will say goodbye to many people that had never been treated before by other professionals; we speak of inhabitants of places of difficult access and those most affected by poverty, she said.
According to the deputy, on Brazilian soil, the Cuban doctors have lived unknown experiences until their arrival, since in socialist Cuba there are not many of the problems they dealt with.
They changed a scenario in which people died from curable diseases, and they did so because of their direct contact with people and their consecration, without taking into account time or days of the week, she stressed.
Luna noted that just a few months after his arrival in Brazil as part of the More Doctors Program, Cuban aid workers began to receive recognition from the population.
It did not matter that they provided services in municipalities of one or another dominant political trend, all the surveys reflect the acceptance, she said.
In its announcement of the withdraw from the program, the Ministry of Public Health described the situation created by Bolsonaro as an unfortunate reality and warned that the decision was communicated to the Pan American Health Organization and to the Brazilian political leaders who founded and defended this initiative.
It is not acceptable to question the dignity, professionalism, and altruism of the Cuban collaborators who, with the support of their families, currently provide services in 67 countries, she said.
According to official data, in 55 years, more than 400,000 Cuban health workers have fulfilled thousands of internationalist missions in 164 nations, with achievements such as the fight against Ebola in Africa, blindness in Latin America and the Caribbean, and cholera in Haiti, in addition to its presence in many countries after epidemics and disasters.
As part of More Doctors Program, in the last five years, approximately 20,000 employees took care of 113 million 359 thousand patients in some 3,600 municipalities, reaching a universe of up to 60 million Brazilians.
Bolsonaro questioned the preparation of the Cuban doctors and conditioned their stay in the program to the revalidation of their degree, using as the only way individual recruitment.