> Cuba's biggest export is effectively doctors.

I find it highly amusing how "exporting people" is suddenly portrayed as being an achievement, as if being exploited as an indentured servant is something praiseworthy in the 21st century.

In other contexts this is referred to as human trafficking and exploitation, but being Cuba this is suddenly something to brag about?

I lived in a country where the national health service resorted to hiring cuban "doctors" to fill in vacancies in deserted areas. The Cuban regime ripped them off out of a big chunk of their pay, they had no right to work beyond the job program, the national certification board had to bend over backwards to allow cuban doctors to practice as all they had was a mere 4 year degree whose scientific basis was questionable, and their role in the healthcare service was basically triaging patients to hand over cases to other doctors.

The "Cuba exports doctors" myth doesn't hold to scrutiny. I guess that even Dr Nick Riviera is a godsend in third world countries where people have to walk for hours to get basic medical care, but let's not pretend that Cuba does not coherce undereducated professionals to play a role whose value-added is highly dependent on the development status of the country that pays for this service.

These doctors need to be taught a lot and don't even care about proper hygiene (or as one of them told me "we care about hygiene, it just means something totally different in Cuba"), and don't know the first thing about modern medical procedures using modern technologies and tooling. It's nothing like US or European medical schools - it's like they went to a medical-oriented high school at best. In Europe we just send them to the school again, they can't even skip years or subjects.

Yes lets just swallow the Cuban propaganda that their medicine is somehow magical and more advanced that every other, and ignore the fact that their government have been surviving as a parasite from other countries, helping the dictators stay in power

The US is pretty evil and sanctions on Cuba just affect regular people on the island and keep Florida politicians alive, but Cuba is way eviler. They don't export doctors, they do human trafficking for the enrichment of the communists and their families. Many of my friends were sent to Brazil and Venezuela as doctors, of the 3000 a month dollars the governments of these countries paid them, they only got $200 a month and the gov kept the rest while they were risking their life's in bad neighborhoods and very isolated places in the Amazonas. Does this money go back to help the regular citizen? Nope, it goes to Castro's families and the other new commies that are in power now, there is more poverty, and there are very few hours of electricity in a day right now, there is hunger compared to or worse than Africa and Haiti, there is repression and incarceration of young people who are protesting regularly, including 16-year-old kids and young women. It's that the embargo fault, nope completely, there is no production of anything, communists steal everything for their own enrichment from the government companies. Their media brags about the doctor exports and being a medical potency, yet my mom spent 4 months in pain to see a doctor because all of them have been exported or young ones left the country. There are zero medicines and one person in my family almost died of COVID if they didn't move fast and bribe the hospital director with dollars and suddenly there was medicine. Did they help fight apartheid in Africa? Yep and that was nice but they sent people against their will there, people who were kids and were in the mandatory military service, if you refused to go they did acts of repudiation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_repudiation) with your neighbors and got a job was hard or impossible after you said no. I still know people traumatized from that war.

Source: I was born and raised there my entire life, and just came from there last weekend.