Havana, Cuba.- A group of 204 Cuban health collaborators who worked on Brazil”s More Doctors program returned to the island on Friday as a result of the hostile attitude of the South American country”s president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro.

This is the eleventh flight to Havana in the past week, after the Cuban Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) decided not to continue participating in the initiative, given Bolsonaro’s conditions and threats.

You arrive at the homeland triumphant, with the satisfaction of the duty fulfilled with the Brazilian people and with the land where you were born’, affirmed the MINSA Vice Minister Alfredo Gonzalez in the welcoming to the cooperants, activity headed by the first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Communist Party in Havana, Luis Antonio Torres Iribar.

Gonzalez recalled that the group of doctors provided services in distant places, many of them inaccessible, guided by the humanism that has characterized Cuban health collaboration in more than 160 countries.

A condition from the beginning of More Doctors program, in 2013, was that you would occupy vacancies not covered by Brazilian doctors or by doctors of other nationalities, and so it happened, he said.

The Vice Minister pointed out that the professionals who returned to the island this morning are part of the nearly 20,000 who in the past five years treated 113 million patients.

Cuban doctors have worked in areas of extreme poverty, favelas and indigenous districts, especially in the Amazon, and in more than 700 municipalities that had a doctor for the first time, he added.