Aug. 19—U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ramped up his personal vendetta against Cuba with two special announcements, both dated Aug. 13, intended to crush Cuba’s struggling economy, starve the population and foment social unrest. One is directed against former Brazilian Health Ministry officials and former officials of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), accused of “complicity” in Cuba’s overseas medical mission program, or what Rubio calls a “labor export scheme,” “human trafficking,” etc.
The second one imposes visa restrictions on Cuban, African and Grenadian government officials also for being involved in the Cuban medical brigades program. The State Department doesn’t name specific African countries or Grenadian officials to be sanctioned. It has previously revoked the visas of Cuba’s government leadership, beginning with President Miguel Diaz-Canel, and threatened to revoke the visas of Caribbean nations that have invited Cuban doctors into their countries. Rubio’s threats to revoke the visas of Caribbean government leaders last March were met with an angry pushback.
Sources report that Rubio, whose family was driven out of Cuba by Castro, has a blind rage toward the Cuban regime. He has completely denied the world historical accomplishments of Cuban medicine, internationally in fighting disease, which accomplishments occurred despite a brutal, over 70-year sanctions policy. His political life is linked to the Gusano networks that control much of Florida, and who are as corrupt as the day is long. and intersect with British and American intelligence services.
The source of Rubio’s rage is the Cuban program that has deployed tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and technical experts to developing countries across the globe for decades to provide life-saving medical assistance. These highly-trained medical professionals have worked in several African countries to respond to cholera and ebola epidemics, to treat victims of natural disasters, as in Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, the more recent Covid epidemic and many other emergency situations. Currently they number about 26,000 doctors and nurses working in 55 countries.
Rubio claims this program, for which the Cuban government is paid in foreign currency, “enriches the corrupt Cuban regime” and “deprives the Cuban people of essential medical care”—a baldfaced lie. But his real goal is to deprive the Cuban government of the foreign currency it earns, and on which it depends, under conditions in which the six-decade U.S. embargo continues to prevent Cuba from having normal trade relations with other nations, financial transactions with banks, and imports of vitally-needed products such as syringes, pacemakers, construction and electrical equipment.
The targeting of former Brazilian officials is instructive. State sanctioned two former Brazilian Health Ministry officials, Mozart Julio Tabosa Sales and Roberto Kleiman, who worked with the “Mais Medicos” (More Doctors) program, founded in 2013 under then President Dilma Rousseff, which collaborated with the Cuban doctors deployed to Brazil. Also sanctioned were former officials of the Pan American Health Organization, for abetting “the Cuban regime’s labor export scheme in the Mais Medicos program.” Their visas and those of family members have been revoked. Now, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who will soon go on trial for coup plotting against President Lula da Silva, is demanding that sanctions also be applied to Dilma Rousseff for not only collaborating with Cuban doctors, but also for holding her present post as president of the New Development Bank, the BRICS bank. The Bolsonaristas think that attacking Rousseff would have a “broader impact” because of her role in the BRICS, an “axis of the multipolar world,” according to Brasil 247.