Dear Editor,
It takes a special kind of political gymnastics for a government to terminate a 48‑year‑old medical partnership under the shadow of US sanctions, then turn to the cameras and insist, with a straight face, that it was Cuba who walked away. That, in essence, is what Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony now asks Guyanese to believe: that Havana arbitrarily pulled its doctors out of Guyana, and that our government is merely a passive by‑stander, graciously picking up the pieces.
The public record tells a very different story. For months, regional and local commentary has linked the winding down of Cuba’s medical brigades to a deliberate US campaign, backed by visa threats and sanctions, to stigmatise Havana’s international medical missions as “forced labour” and to punish governments that cooperate with them. Guyana did not exist in a vacuum. When Washington began signaling that officials tied to the Cuban programme could face visa restrictions, and when other governments started retreating from formal brigade agreements, our own administration quietly moved to end the state‑to‑state arrangement and to repackage the relationship in a more US‑compliant form.
This is why the Minister’s new line is so jarring. Only days ago, citizens were petitioning President Ali to reverse “the decision to end” the Cuban Medical Brigade and to “reject US pressure.” That phrasing was not an accident; it reflected a widespread understanding that Georgetown had chosen to step back. Now, with backlash building and Washington pleased, we are suddenly told that “Cuba…chose to terminate or withdraw the Cuban doctors,” as if Havana had suddenly become tired of nearly five decades of solidarity and hard currency and decided, on a whim, to abandon one of its longest‑standing partners. It is an insult, not just to Cuban officials, but to the intelligence of the Guyanese people.
We must ask a simple, common‑sense question: what plausible interest would the Government of Cuba have in unilaterally dismantling a cooperation model that brings in critical revenue and showcases its soft power? At the very moment when US sanctions are squeezing its economy, and when it has historically leaned on medical diplomacy with countries like Guyana to survive, Havana is supposed to have voluntarily shut off a successful programme in a friendly, oil‑rich CARICOM state? That is not diplomacy; it is fantasy. The only actors who have openly called for the dismantling of these brigades are in Washington, not in Havana.
The real giveaway lies not in the Minister’s talking points, but in the structure of what has replaced the brigade. The government now boasts that it will hire Cuban doctors, nurses and technicians “individually,” once they meet local licensing requirements. This sounds innocuous, even progressive, until one realises how perfectly it fits the US script. Washington’s problem has never been with Cuban doctors as individuals; it has been with states that enter formal agreements with Havana, pay the Cuban government, and allow it to manage the deployment and remuneration of its personnel. By ending the formal bilateral programme but continuing to recruit Cuban professionals on an individual basis, Guyana gets to keep the skills while ticking the right boxes in US human‑rights rhetoric. It is not a rupture; it is a redesign to please a more powerful partner.
If Cuba were truly the one “pulling the plug,” we would expect to see the consequences across the full spectrum of cooperation, not just in the branding of the medical brigade.
Where is the evidence that Havana has expelled Guyanese students from its universities, torn up scholarship agreements, or announced a general severing of health‑sector ties with Guyana? On the contrary, the fear articulated by health advocates is that it is Guyana that will quietly stop sending new cohorts of students to study medicine in Cuba, not that Cuba has slammed its doors on existing or future students. For decades, a large share of our doctors have been trained in Cuban lecture halls and hospitals. If Havana truly wished to walk away, that is where the ax would fall. It has not.
This is the “smoking gun” that exposes the duplicity in the current narrative. The scholarships tell us who is really retreating. We see no reports of Guyanese students being bundled onto planes and sent home by Cuban authorities. What we do see is a government in Georgetown that, under mounting US pressure, appears increasingly hesitant to renew scholarship programmes or to formalise medical brigades, even as it quietly absorbs Cuban‑trained personnel into the public system under a new legal guise. The withdrawal is not Cuban hostility; it is Guyanese caution dressed up as Cuban choice.
The Health Minister assures us that the withdrawal of the brigade has had “no impact” on the country. That claim, too, deserves scrutiny. It is true that Guyana has been scaling up training for local nurses and other professionals, and no one should begrudge that. But for years, Cuban doctors and nurses have kept the health system afloat in hinterland communities and regional hospitals that struggled to attract local staff. To present the end of a nearly half‑century partnership as a mere administrative adjustment, easily absorbed by a wave of new graduates, is to trivialise the lived reality of patients who relied on those brigades when no one else came.
Worse, this is happening at a moment when oil and gold revenues are transforming Guyana into a strategic darling of the United States. It is not paranoid to note that St Lucia and others have been publicly pressed and even shamed for sending students to Cuba, while Guyana’s shift is met with smiles and silence. A small island that relies on Cuba for its doctors is lectured and threatened with visa penalties; an oil‑rich ally that quietly reconfigures its Cuban ties is congratulated for its “reforms.” The double standard is obvious. It is also precisely why the Guyanese government should be honest with its people about the external pressures it faces, rather than pretending that Havana abruptly lost interest in cooperation.
This is not an argument against building local capacity or diversifying partnerships. It is an argument against the cowardice of hiding behind Cuba’s back while marching obediently in Washington’s line. If our leaders believe that continued formal participation in Cuban medical programmes exposes them to unacceptable US sanctions or visa risks, they should have the courage to say so openly and to invite a national conversation about how to protect our health system in that context. Instead, we get a convenient fiction in which Cuba is the one who “chose” to leave, while Guyana heroically rescues some of its doctors on a one‑by‑one basis.
Guyana owes Cuba more than this. At our lowest points, when larger powers turned away, it was Cuban medical solidarity that filled our clinics and operating theatres. Many of today’s Guyanese specialists learned their craft in Cuban institutions, in Spanish, under a system that saw their education as part of a broader project of South–South cooperation. To now recast that history as an embarrassing entanglement that we are relieved to escape—blaming Havana in the process—cheapens our own story as much as it dishonours theirs.
In the end, this is about sovereignty and honesty. A sovereign government is free to align itself with Washington, to reconfigure its international partnerships, even to terminate old alliances. What it is not free to do, without moral consequence, is to drag a long‑time partner’s name through the mud to cover its own submission to a more powerful state. The Guyanese people deserve better than that. If our leaders have chosen the path of US demands over Caribbean solidarity, they should own that choice, not hide it behind carefully scripted lines about who “pulled the plug.”