Panama’s health minister on Monday defended the deployment of more than 200 Cuban doctors to help the Central American country battle the coronavirus, despite criticism of the island government’s human rights record at home.
He said his government would not hesitate to “sign it again.”
“The same people who today criticize the agreement signed with the Cuban Health Ministry would have been criticizing if there were dead in the streets, or if people were dying in the corridors of hospitals because we had no doctors to treat them,” Sucre said.
The Cubans arrived in Panama on December 24, at a time when Panama was facing a crisis that had completely overwhelmed its health system and exhausted local doctors.
The decision to bring Cuban doctors produced controversy in some sectors because in Panama, medical practice is restricted to local professionals.
The announcement also met with resistance from Washington.
“Make contracts transparent and pay workers directly,” he said.
Washington and some human rights organizations consider the sale of Cuban medical services a form of “forced labour” that “violates human rights” and only serves as propaganda for the Communist government of the island.
During his speech, Sucre said that in addition to Cuba, the Panamanian government also requested medical support from other countries, such as the United States, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Italy, Israel, China and Russia, but had been unsuccessful.
“The criticisms are easy, the difficult thing is to be here directing a pandemic that nobody asked for,” Sucre said.
Panama, with 4.2 million inhabitants, has the highest number of Covid-19 cases in Central America, with more than 327,000 cases and 5,506 deaths.
