A group of Cuban physicians now living in the United States allege they were exploited through a state-run medical labor program they describe as modern-day slavery, and they are seeking $129 million in damages through a lawsuit.
According to the complaint, roughly 3,500 Cuban doctors were assigned to work in Brazil from 2013 to 2018. The filing alleges Cuba collected more than $2.3 billion for their labor while the medical workers received only “a small fraction” of the money — less than 10% of what they earned.
The doctors claim they were not told before leaving Cuba that about 90% of their wages would be diverted to the Cuban government once they began working overseas.
The lawsuit, filed in Washington, DC, also alleges the physicians were closely monitored by Cuban intelligence officials while stationed in Brazil and were pressured to gather information on the country hosting them.
The plaintiffs further claim they were warned that abandoning the mission would mean losing all pay and being barred from returning to Cuba for eight years. In several instances, the lawsuit alleges, relatives left behind in Cuba were effectively used as leverage.
The doctors are pursuing damages from the Washington, DC-based Pan American Health Organization, or PAHO, which receives partial funding from the US government. The complaint says PAHO served as the financial go-between in the arrangement and collected a 5% administrative fee tied to the Cuban medical workers’ services.
“PAHO became the creator, manager, and enforcer of the enterprise through which Cuba shipped medical professionals to Brazil under conditions constituting human trafficking under international law and US law,” the lawsuit states.
One plaintiff, Ramona Matos, said she was assigned to Brazil’s Amazon region, where she claims she lived under a 6 p.m. curfew and was threatened by Cuban intelligence minders after walking to a bakery to buy bread and smoke a cigarette.
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Another doctor, Tatiana Carballo Gomez, was instructed to tell her Brazilian patients to vote against an incumbent mayor in Brazil and support left-wing candidates Cuba endorsed, the court papers say. When one of her Cuban colleagues used social media to complain about their paltry salaries, Cuban handlers issued a warning.
“In Plaintiff’s view, the advisors were there ‘to catch you, capture you and send you home, using the threat there were 1,000 people in line in Cuba to replace her and her colleagues,’” the court papers say.
The Cuban doctors recently scored a victory in the suit when a DC federal Circuit Court lamented how PAHO stretched out an immunity defense for several years. PAHO has also refused to produce relevant banking documents showing commissions from the Cuban doctors’ program in Brazil, court documents say.
“PAHO has cynically chosen to slow-roll the case, hide behind immunity arguments it keeps losing,” said Sam Dubbin, the Miami-based attorney for the plaintiffs.
PAHO said in a statement that at Brazil’s request, it provided technical cooperation to its Mais Médicos Program from 2013 until 2018.
“PAHO maintains that it acted lawfully in providing technical cooperation in connection with the Mais Médicos Program and will continue to defend its position in the ongoing proceedings. As the matter remains before the courts, PAHO will not comment further.”
Matos, Gomez and two others represent the medical professionals from Cuba who have been granted humanitarian parole by the US Department of Homeland Security and now live in the US, many of them residing in South Florida.
Since 2016, the US State Department has confirmed Cuba’s medical missions are a “form of human slavery.”
According to the agency’s 2020-2025 Trafficking in Persons Reports for Cuba, “there was a government policy or pattern to profit from labor expert programs with strong indications of forced labor particularly in its foreign medical missions program.”
