The U.S. State Department has announced sweeping visa revocations and restrictions targeting several foreign officials.
Visa restrictions have been imposed on officials and their family members from several regions—including Brazil, Cuba and Grenada—for their alleged participation in facilitating Cuba’s medical mission program.
Newsweek has contacted the U.S. State Department for comment via email outside office hours.
Why It Matters
The latest visa restrictions signal the Trump administration’s tougher approach to confronting Cuba’s overseas medical mission programs and penalizing governments that participate in or facilitate them.
U.S. President Donald Trump‘s government has deployed hard-line policies toward the communist country. For decades, Cuba has deployed medical personnel to less-developed countries, with the host nations providing payments that contribute to Cuba’s foreign currency earnings. According to the U.S. State Department, numerous doctors have reported experiencing exploitation within this arrangement, which involved coordination through the Pan American Health Organization and Brazil’s Ministry of Health.
What To Know
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the visas of two former Brazilian health officials, Mozart Julio Tabosa Sales and Alberto Kleiman, had been revoked.
These individuals were connected to Brazil’s Mais Médicos (“More Doctors”) initiative, a program that hosted Cuban medical personnel in remote areas of Brazil during President Dilma Rousseff’s administration.
“These officials were responsible for or involved in abetting the Cuban regime’s coercive labor export scheme, which exploits Cuban medical workers through forced labor. This scheme enriches the corrupt Cuban regime and deprives the Cuban people of essential medical care,” Rubio said in a news release on August 13.
Tabosa Sales and Kleiman served in Brazil’s Ministry of Health during the Rousseff administration, a period when thousands of Cuban medical professionals were deployed to deliver health care services in remote and economically disadvantaged regions of the country.
The State Department described Cuba’s medical missions as a system that “rented” medical professionals to other nations at high prices, with most of the revenue retained by Cuban authorities.
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio pushed back on the allegations put forward by the U.S. State Department.
What People Are Saying
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement: “Dozens of Cuban doctors that served in the program have reported being exploited by the Cuban regime as part of the program.”
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio wrote on X, translated from Spanish: “Cuba will not abandon its medical service programs in dozens of countries. They are absolutely legitimate and, more importantly, save lives and support communities. The U.S. secretary of state is a dishonest politician, intent on causing harm at the expense of depriving many of health care services.”
What Happens Next
It remains to be seen whether the affected countries, which include African nations, will issue diplomatic responses.
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