While the slave trade in the West used to focus on violently importing unskilled labor, today’s Cuban socialism revives slave practices through the coercive force of the State, trafficking in professionals, especially those providing health care services.

Yes. The socialism that promised a great leap forward, progressivism (which is not the same as progress) established a model of government that has more to do with absolute monarchy than with democracy or parliamentarism and reinstituted the condemned practice of slavery as an economic pillar of a social system.

For decades, the Castro regime has sent thousands of health care professionals to work in remote locations and cities in dozens of countries. It does so under conditions of semi-slavery, confiscating the doctors’ passports, prohibiting them from maintaining relationships of any kind with patients, controlling their movements, what they say and hear (lest “imperialist propaganda” show them that there are better ways to live), and allowing them to collect only a fraction of what the destination countries pay Cuba for their services.

The “source” for extracting those who will be subjected to servitude is no longer the coasts of Africa, but rather the network of 13 medical universities distributed throughout the Cuban archipelago. There, they have found tens of thousands of health care professionals, ranging from doctors, dentists, and nurses to health technologists and professors.

Race is no longer a key element in these modern socialist trafficking operations, as it was in the transatlantic or trans-Saharan trade, but rather it occurs within the rich European and African heritage of the Cuban people. The modern “negreros” (as traffickers were called in the Hispanic world) are the hierarchs and bureaucrats in the depressing and claustrophobic offices of socialism. The “slave ships” are planes of the state-owned company Cubana de Aviación. The Castro regime, of course, does not acknowledge the operation under such names, but rather calls them, with proletarian martiality, “Internationalist Missions.”

These “missions” take place on every continent. The Cuban state negotiates with other governments about how many doctors to send to places as distant as East Timor, Italy, Mexico, or Namibia. The governments agree on a monthly price per doctor, which is paid in Havana to the Cuban Medical Services Marketing Company (in Spanish, CSMC, S.A.), designated to “manage the export of medical, health, and academic services, both within Cuba and abroad.” After the money reaches its coffers, the doctors on the ground receive between 20 and 30% of the total amount disbursed. A few dollars — though more than the $25 they would earn monthly if they stayed on the island.

In some cases, the health professionals die in violent circumstances in marginalized neighborhoods of South America or at the hands of Islamist terrorists in Africa. It doesn’t matter. For Havana, they are replaceable. Flesh for money, which continues to flow into the veins of the old left-wing empire in the heart of the Americas.

Knowing firsthand about this entire tragedy and how important it is for the battered Castroist economy, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has launched a strong diplomatic campaign to eliminate the remaining human trafficking routes for professionals. Cuba currently has some 24,180 doctors under these conditions in 56 countries, with some in Caribbean nations.

U.S. embassies in that region have been frequently issuing messages urging the immediate elimination of these human trafficking agreements, which expose Cuban doctors to significant dangers. The United States threatened in early 2025 to restrict visas for officials involved with the Cuban “missions.”

However, the fight is not easy. The news outlet Voice of America highlighted months ago that several Caribbean leaders rejected the new U.S. policy, asserting that the work of hundreds of Cuban health professionals in the region was essential — much like Southern U.S. slaveholders before 1865, when referring to slave labor. “Their presence here is important to our health system,” said Kamina Johnson Smith, Jamaica’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, regarding the more than 400 doctors, nurses, biomedical engineers, and technicians on the island.

Last March, the foreign ministers of the 15-member Caribbean trade bloc, CARICOM, met with the U.S. Special Envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone. The meeting yielded contradictory statements. Hugh Todd, Guyana’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, offered an excuse, saying that the United States was a strategic partner for CARICOM, but that the issue of the Cuban “missions” should be addressed at the level of heads of government.

The question remains whether the governments of countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, or Guyana will even consider the option of pressuring the Cuban regime to pay the Cuban doctors directly, without the money passing through the hands of the state-owned CSMC, S.A. Or will they hide behind the needs of their own populations to ignore the clear violations of the freedoms of the “brigades” (as the Spanish called the work groups on a plantation) of white-coated medical professionals?