Brazilian government ordered to rehire Cuban doctors

A Brazilian court on Friday ordered the federal government to rehire over 1,700 Cuban doctors that previously served under the More Doctors Program, created in 2013 by the Dilma Rousseff administration. The program sent about 18,200 healthcare workers to mostly remote areas around Brazil, of which around 8,300 were Cuban. 

In late 2018, after being elected president, Jair Bolsonaro announced he would impose conditions on Cuba in order to keep the program going, such as demanding that the physicians validate their diplomas in Brazil. In reaction, the Cuban government said that it was pulling out of the More Doctors Program.

Thousands of Cuban physicians left the country, but it is estimated that some 2,000 of them remained. In late 2019, about 700 had married Brazilians.

The Bolsonaro administration announced a new program, Doctors for Brazil, in order to gradually replace More Doctors. Foreign physicians that already served under More Doctors were given a two-year waiver to work for the new program, but new foreigners would be required to validate their diplomas in Brazil. In practice, however, the government only hired one batch of 529 professionals under Doctors for Brazil — in April 2022, during the fourth and final year of Mr. Bolsonaro’s term.

The new primary healthcare secretary, Nésio Fernandes, said that in practice the Doctors for Brazil program was not able to replace More Doctors. About 300 Brazilian cities have not had a doctor for over a year, he said.

In 2018, The Brazilian Report showed how the Dilma Rousseff administration bypassed Congress in order to bring in Cuban doctors. The Brazilian government paid the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), which hired the Cuban Government, which for its part employed the doctors. About 70 percent of the money paid for their salaries was kept by the Cuban government.

The exact number of 1,789 physicians affected by last week’s ruling was confirmed to The Brazilian Report by attorney Humberto Jorge Brito, who represents the Cuban physicians in the lawsuit.

Under the More Doctors program, physicians were sent to cities in groups or “classes”, some of which were renewed for new stints. Cuban physicians petitioned the courts to be given the same renewal terms as their Brazilian counterparts.

The request was denied in a lower court, but the ruling was overturned on Friday by the Federal Appellate Court of the 1st region (TRF-1), headquartered in Brasília. Appellate judge Carlos Pires Brandão wrote that the Cuban doctors could potentially be employed to address the humanitarian crisis of the indigenous Yanomami people, which the Lula administration decreed as an emergency.

The Health Ministry’s press office told The Brazilian Report it had not yet been formally notified of the ruling but that it will attend to it “with haste” once it is.

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