Brazil & Southern Cone - February 2014 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Brazil’s foreign minister, Luiz Alberto Figueiredo, was in Havana, Cuba, on 13 February for talks with his Cuban counterpart Bruno Parrilla over the recent desertions of Cuban doctors working in Brazil under the ‘Mais Médicos’ scheme.

Brazil does not want the issue to become a diplomatic incident between the two allies. According to foreign ministry sources, Figueiredo hopes for an agreement with Parrilla to perhaps slightly improve the remuneration slightly the doctors. However cash-strapped Cuba, which has long depended for crucial foreign exchange on its exports of medical services, may be reluctant to contemplate that. Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff also aims to use the Mais Médicos programme as a key plank of her campaign for re-election in October. The scheme, under which just over 5,700 Cuban doctors have been imported to work in remote regions of Brazil where there is an acute shortage of local medical personnel, appears very popular in the areas in which it operates.

On some accounts, between four and 10 doctors have now abandoned the scheme, complaining that they are being given only a slither of their monthly salaries by the Cuban health ministry, with most of it withheld in Cuba. Cuba stands to bank almost US$300m a year from the scheme, according to estimates by Brazilian economists.

The Cuban doctors are paid US$1,000 a month (or roughly R$2,400), of which US$400 is paid into a bank account in Brazil and the rest into an account in Cuba. Brazilian doctors earn about R$10,000 on average a month (US$4,174), according to the national medical association (Associação Médica Brasileira [AMB]). The monthly minimum wage in Brazil for 2014 is R$724 (US$302).

The AMB, which was fiercely critical of the Mais Médicos scheme from the outset and is now happy to use it as a political stick against the Rousseff government, claims that the Cuban doctors are working in Brazil under conditions of “virtual slavery”.

Florentino Cardoso, the AMB president, says that in the wake of the first high-profile desertion of Ramona Rodrigues — who has now been offered an administrative post by the AMB paying some R$3,000 a month (about US$1,200) while she converts her credentials — a further nine Cuban doctors have approached the association for help. The AMB has set up a hotline and an email address for Cubans wanting assistance.

• On 5 February one of the Cuban doctors in the Mais Médicos program, Ramona Matos Rodríguez, 51, left the city of Pacajá in Pará for Brasília, where she sought asylum in the federal chamber of deputies, thereby becoming the first defector from the scheme.