It is en­cour­ag­ing to see heads of gov­ern­ment of the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com), in­clud­ing our own Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, lin­ing up be­hind Cu­ba and singing from the same prover­bial hymn sheet, fol­low­ing threats by the re­cent­ly in­stalled Don­ald Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion to im­pose visa re­stric­tions on coun­tries hir­ing Cuban med­ical doc­tors.

Not for the first time since tak­ing of­fice in Jan­u­ary, US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio has been the pur­vey­or of the threat­en­ing news, warn­ing on this oc­ca­sion that this par­tic­u­lar group of “trust­ed” health­care pro­fes­sion­als, who have been de­liv­er­ing vi­tal ser­vices to the re­gion for decades, has been en­gaged in “forced labour” and a form of “hu­man traf­fick­ing.”

“The Unit­ed States is ex­pand­ing its Cu­ba-re­lat­ed visa re­stric­tion pol­i­cy, and the State De­part­ment has tak­en steps to re­strict visa is­suance to Cuban and com­plic­it third-coun­try gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials and in­di­vid­u­als re­spon­si­ble for Cu­ba’s ex­ploita­tive labour ex­port pro­gramme,” said Ru­bio, adding that the US will pro­mote ac­count­abil­i­ty for the Cuban regime for op­press­ing its peo­ple and those who prof­it from forced labour. 

How­ev­er, like Dr Row­ley, and in­deed oth­er Cari­com lead­ers, we are not about to rush to any such judge­ment, or squan­der 52 years of un­bro­ken diplo­mat­ic friend­ship on the al­tar of ex­pe­di­en­cy.

In fact, we pre­fer, in the ab­sence of any ma­te­r­i­al ev­i­dence of traf­fick­ing and ex­ploita­tion with re­spect to the Cuban med­ical doc­tors who live and work among us, to fo­cus on the suc­cess­es of the pro­gramme through the years.

To say that the Cari­com-Cu­ba re­la­tion­ship has been tried, test­ed and proven, is an un­der­state­ment.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the threats hang­ing over Cu­ba to­day are not at all dis­sim­i­lar to those which ex­ist­ed in De­cem­ber 1972, when four brave Caribbean coun­tries—Bar­ba­dos, Guyana, Ja­maica, and Trinidad and To­ba­go—end­ed Ha­vana’s glob­al iso­la­tion through the es­tab­lish­ment of for­mal diplo­mat­ic re­la­tions.

Since then, a grate­ful Ha­vana has been a pil­lar of sup­port for this re­gion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the area of health­care, with thou­sands of Cari­com na­tion­als—in­clud­ing late prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning—un­der­go­ing med­ical pro­ce­dures in Cu­ba and tout­ing its val­ue.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, hun­dreds of Trinida­di­an na­tion­als have trav­elled to Ha­vana and ben­e­fit­ed from its free eye care pro­gramme.

Un­der the Cuban schol­ar­ship pro­gramme, South-South co­op­er­a­tion has fur­ther flour­ished and deep­ened, with hun­dreds of stu­dents hav­ing grad­u­at­ed from Cuban uni­ver­si­ties with med­ical sci­ences spe­cial­i­ties, most­ly as med­ical doc­tors.

More­over, Cuban doc­tors have be­come an es­sen­tial part of this re­gion’s health­care sys­tem. Many of them have been work­ing in T&T since Ju­ly 2003, as part of the Cuban Med­ical Brigade es­tab­lished by now de­ceased Cuban pres­i­dent Fi­del Cas­tro, with Cuban au­thor­i­ties es­ti­mat­ing that rough­ly 1,200 med­ical work­ers have com­plet­ed mis­sions in T&T since the arrange­ment be­gan.

Cari­com’s cur­rent stance in sup­port of em­bat­tled Cu­ba should, there­fore, come as no sur­prise, even in the face of the shift­ing tec­ton­ic plates of geo-pol­i­tics.

We ap­pre­ci­ate that in the po­lit­i­cal realm, every­thing is not al­ways as it seems and that for every ac­tion there is a re­ac­tion.

How­ev­er, as in­de­pen­dent na­tions, we must be al­lowed to ul­ti­mate­ly make our own choic­es, es­pe­cial­ly in cir­cum­stances where rhetoric ap­pears to be drown­ing out rea­son.

As it per­tains to the cur­rent claims about Cu­ba, our hope is that cool­er heads will pre­vail and that the tenets of mul­ti-lat­er­al­ism will be al­lowed to stand, so too our tried and proven friend­ships. Af­ter all, unit­ed we stand, di­vid­ed we fall.