Cuba's doctors were a lifeline for the world. Now the Caribbean is shamefully complicit in the US drive to expel them

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/11/cuba-doctors-lifeline-world-caribbean-complicit-us-expel

gospels: “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” It is recited from the Americas to Africa, invoked in speeches, embroidered into national mottoes.

But like many moral injunctions, it has proven easier to proclaim than to live by. Across the Caribbean and Latin America, something extraordinary and shameful is unfolding.

Cuban doctors, emissaries of one of the world’s most besieged nations, are being expelled from host nations, contracts terminated, health programmes dismantled. And, in their absence, the poorest will pay – in untreated illnesses, unattended births, undiagnosed cancers. The region is, in effect, amputating its own lifeline – under pressure from the US.

On Friday the Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez accused the US of “extorting” countries by forcing them to cancel decades-old deals with Havana for the supply of doctors.