By Prince Kapone on June 18, 2025
When Edith M. Lederer ― a UN press-room fixture since Vietnam ― files a wire, the voice of Uncle Sam still echoes through the copy. Her latest piece for the Associated Press claims that Cuba’s global health brigades amount to “forced labor.” The accusation doesn’t come from a patients’ union or a medical watchdog; it drips straight from Senator Marco Rubio’s podium, yet Lederer repeats it verbatim, without pausing to verify whether the hundreds of thousands who have queued for Cuban care consider their physicians enslaved or emancipatory.
Lederer’s moral panic criminalizes solidarity; her curated outrage audaciously ignores the 800,000 people in U.S. prisons working for pennies, the kafala systems in Gulf states propped up by U.S. arms deals, and the injury-ridden Amazon warehouses whose gig labor never merits scrutiny. She omits the U.S. blockade’s $4.87 billion toll on Cuba’s healthcare system between 2022 and 2023—not oversight, but complicity. She launders Washington’s visa bans and sanctions as neutral diplomacy and frames the Organization of American States as an impartial watchdog, omitting that the U.S. bankrolls more than half its budget. This is lawfare disguised as journalism: a weaponized script dressed in humanitarian prose, where Cold War ghosts are resurrected in surgical masks and stethoscopes. Cuba is not portrayed as a nation healing the sick—it is cast as a trafficker of white-coated subversives.
Finally, the article closes with a twist of emotional misdirection. Having accused Cuba of abusing its workers, Lederer sheds a tear for Cuban-Americans who may now struggle to get visas under new restrictions. But she conveniently ignores that it is Rubio and the U.S. State Department who are tearing apart families and punishing diaspora communities, not Havana. What we’re left with is a mirror-world narrative, where the empire that chokes a country to near-collapse claims the moral high ground because it noticed someone coughing.
Strip away the AP’s varnish and we see the real playbook: demonize a socialist model that delivers healthcare without a billing department, then tighten the sanctions architecture to suffocate the very system you’ve slandered. That, comrades, is how imperial propaganda turns a stethoscope into contraband while the market turns illness into gold.
Extraction & Contextualization: Lifting the Veil on Cuba’s Humanitarian Vanguard
When St. Vincent & the Grenadines’ Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves vowed he would “sooner give up my own visa” than lose Cuban dialysis teams, he wasn’t praising propaganda, but defending life-saving solidarity. And when CARICOM leaders decried U.S. pressure as “economic coercion,” they were speaking up for their people’s right to healthcare, not for Havana’s political agenda.
The Associated Press article admits that Cuba has sent more than 100,000 doctors to over 70 countries, with 22,000 still actively serving in more than 50 nations. It even notes host nations voluntarily pay stipends—yet fails to comment that brigade doctors earn 3–5× Cuba’s average wage, hardly indentured labor. Meanwhile, injury-prone Amazon warehouse pickers and gig workers in the U.S. subsist on subsistence wages—an irony that never makes the AP’s headlines.
Meanwhile, U.S. medical residents graduate with a median debt of approximately $200,000, indentured to banks before they ever touch a stethoscope—while Cuban doctors owe nothing but solidarity.
“Cuba has 8.2 doctors per 1,000 people; the U.S. has 2.6. Guess which system ‘traffics’ healers?”
Go back to March 2020: Reuters reported that a 52-member Cuban team was the first to arrive in Lombardy, Italy’s COVID‑19 epicenter, answering a direct appeal as European hospitals were collapsing. The Guardian confirmed 52 more arrived in Calabria (where my family comes from) later that year, reinforcing that when health systems bleed, Cuba sends its white‑coat brigades without red tape.
Consider Africa: Cuba sent a Henry Reeve brigade to help extinguish the Ebola terror in 2014, and in 2020 it deployed 216 medical workers to South Africa—another chapter in its decades-long mission of anti-colonial internationalism, not a propaganda stunt, as Al Jazeera documented.
This isn’t a post‑2010 novelty. Cuba charted its medical diplomacy in the 1960s, from post‑hurricane Honduras and cholera‑haunted Haiti to Angola, where Cuban doctors provided over half the national health services between 1975 and 1991. That is globalism rooted in revolutionary praxis, not contract labor, as noted in the historical archive of Cuban medical internationalism.
On biotech sovereignty: Cuba created the Abdala and Soberana vaccines despite the U.S. embargo—elevating public health above profit. Abdala, a protein-subunit vaccine with 92 % efficacy, was exported to Mexico, Venezuela, and Vietnam. The Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) led the program, even forming partnerships in Iran amid unilateral sanctions, as detailed in the British Medical Journal and Wikipedia entries for Abdala and Soberana 02.
Those vaccines came under fire not from Cuban scientists, but from the embargo. Banks refused transactions for shipping syringes; components were blocked at ports. According to Democracy Now!, the U.S. kept nearly 400 sanctions in place while Cuban biotech scaled up vaccine production. That is Financial Piracy in action.
The embargo’s toll cannot be overstated: U.S. estimates show $4.87 billion in damages between March 2022–February 2023—an assault that burdens hospitals, limits oxygen, and starves research. That is more than a policy; it is structural violence.
Meanwhile, the empire’s moral logic forgets that U.S. prison workers produce at least $11 billion in goods and services annually for pennies an hour, and more than a quarter of U.S. gig workers earn less than their state’s minimum wage. But suddenly, when solidarity flows from the South to the South and North, it becomes “forced labor.”
The pressure campaigns are no less violent: the U.S. slapped visa bans on Cuban and Central American officials, and lobbied Caribbean governments to cancel Cuban contracts. The Bahamas complied, cutting their care; CARICOM leaders warned of serious harm as nations pushed back against timed visa threats. That is not oversight—it is economic coercion.
When you stack these revelations together, you see why the original AP article is so hollow: Cuba’s medical brigades are a revolutionary export, born of Anti‑Imperialist Sovereignty and Multipolar solidarity. They are healing projects financed by the people’s state, not exploitative sweatshops. And what does the empire wield in response? Propaganda, lawfare, sanctions architecture, and diplomatic blackmail—all wrapped in the faintest claim of humanitarian concern.
Reframing the Narrative: Cuban Medicine as Revolutionary, Not “Forced”
Strip away the AP’s moral panic and a different picture emerges: Cuba’s global health brigades are a living experiment in proletarian internationalism, not an export version of indenture. The white-coat volunteers flooding disaster zones and rural clinics are graduates of a tuition-free university that rewards social commitment over market value—a direct inversion of capitalist medicine’s pay-to-heal paradigm. As Weaponized Information’s “Starving the Revolution” explains, Cuba codified health solidarity as state doctrine precisely because the U.S. embargo weaponized scarcity; the island’s answer was to socialize medical knowledge and share it across borders. That act of defiance—curing where big pharma bills—terrifies empire far more than any missile once did.
Imperial pundits call the doctors “forced labour,” but the numbers tell another story. Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade has, since 2005, treated over 4 million patients in crises worldwide. They deployed to Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, to Haiti after the 2010 quake, to Sierra Leone and Liberia during Ebola, and to Lombardy when COVID‑19 emptied ICU wards. No host government accused Havana of trafficking; most petitioned for extensions. In Haiti, Cuban paediatric oncology teams helped slash child‑cancer mortality by 25 %, a milestone noted when the Brigade earned Nobel Peace Prize nominations. Where Washington sees coerced labour, patients see human lifelines.
Even bourgeois medical journals admit Cuba’s model indicts empire: the New England Journal of Medicine framed Cuba’s approach as “social medicine beyond markets,” contrasting it with U.S. medical bankruptcy striking half‑million families each year. This clash of paradigms sits at the heart of the current smear: if the public recognises that a poor socialist nation delivers better outcomes than the richest empire, capitalism’s moral legitimacy erodes. Hence the rhetorical trick: Cuba must be painted as abuser, its doctors as victims, its patients as collateral. Only then can profiteering remain commonsense.
Imperially-scripted fears about “Cuban brain drain” ring especially hollow when looked at honestly: recent surveys show over 70,000 U.S. physicians quit clinical practice in just one year between 2021 and 2022—driven by burnout, corporate offers, and market pressures—yet that mass exodus is framed as “career growth,” not exploitation. When Cuba graduates healers for underserved communities, critics denounce coercion; when Wall Street recruits surgeons for liposuction consultancies, it’s celebrated.
At the ideological core is Cuba’s doctrine of Anti‑Imperialist Sovereignty: a small socialist state refusing to outsource survival to the IMF. The Cuban Revolution built 13 medical faculties and 498 polyclinics in half a century; the U.S. blockade, by contrast, blocked $4.87 billion in medical imports last fiscal year alone. Havana thus turned embargo pressure into institutional innovation, producing its own ventilators, cancer vaccines, and pandemic-era jabs. “Necessity became laboratory,” as WI’s “Biotech Sovereignty in Silence” notes—and when Abdala and Soberana‑02 hit 90‑plus percent efficacy, Cuba offered tech-transfer deals to Vietnam, Iran, and Ghana without patent strings. Nothing could more starkly expose the mercenary logic of a global vaccine apartheid than a sanctioned island giving away its science.
The empire retaliated with a hybrid barrage: visa bans to frighten Caribbean ministries, bank throttling to stop stipend payments, and a narrative war portraying volunteerism as bondage. Senator Rubio’s campaign letter to the OAS demanded audits of every brigade contract; the goal was never transparency but lawfare: bury solidarity under paperwork until it suffocates. Visa threats already cost The Bahamas its Cuban clinicians in 2024, triggering staff gaps documented by the Nassau Tribune. Each cancellation becomes propaganda ammo: shortages then get blamed on Cuban inefficiency, not on the State Department’s extortion.
The Pan American Health Organization brief credited Cuban specialists with restoring paediatric oncology services in post-earthquake Haiti, cutting child-cancer mortality by a quarter. Italian unions called for awarding the brigades the Nobel Peace Prize. Such endorsements puncture the trafficking narrative so thoroughly that Western outlets resort to euphemism—speaking of “controversial diplomacy” rather than acknowledging lives saved.
So let’s name the contradiction plainly. Cuba’s health brigades materialise a Dual and Contending Power: a people-centred welfare structure functioning both inside and beyond the island, defying the cash-for-care norm that capitalism enforces. Each brigade is a political statement that another world already lives in embryo—stitched together in barrios and bush clinics, not corporate boardrooms. That is why Washington must discredit them. If the idea spreads that solidarity can outrun sanctions and produce life-saving science, then the logic of profit begins to fracture, and with it, imperial authority.
Mobilizing North-Side Conscience: How We Convert Outrage into Material Solidarity
I write from the belly of the beast—inside an empire whose television anchors say “freedom” with one hand on the sanctions trigger. If you live anywhere in the NATO core, you already fund this siege through your taxes, your silence, or your confusion. That makes each of us responsible for ending it. The task is not to “save” Cuba—Cuba has saved itself for 65 years—but to unshackle the island from a blockade we did not vote for and most of our neighbors barely understand. So let’s get specific.
First, learn the terrain. Every November the United Nations General Assembly votes to condemn the U.S. embargo; last year the tally was 187‑2, with only Washington and Tel Aviv clinging to the blockade UN GA 12650. That annual isolation is our diplomatic scarlet letter. The same week, corporate newsrooms bury the story under sports scores and tech gossip. Our counter‑narrative begins by amplifying that lopsided vote so loudly that even the most apolitical coworker can’t ignore it.
Second, plug into existing solidarity arteries rather than reinventing them. Since 1992 the IFCO / Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan has driven buses of school supplies, medical equipment, and human solidarity straight through U.S. customs, daring the Treasury Department to stop them. No one waits for “permission” to practice humanity; they roll. Sign up for the next caravan or host a supply‑drop point in your union hall, church basement, or community center. If faith leaders can risk federal fines, tech workers and grad students can too.
Third, weaponize legislative daylight. Demand sit‑ins at Senate offices to urge co‑sponsorship of the United States–Cuba Trade Act of 2025 (S.136). Jam switchboards with worker delegations and flood representatives’ inboxes and phone lines until their staffs recite your talking points by heart. Call out lawmakers taking Pharma donations while blocking Cuban vaccine imports—EXPOSE their conflicts with FEC and OpenSecrets data. Expose corporations like Western Union for profiteering off remittance fees while lobbying to keep the blockade alive.
Drag Western Union into daylight: they charge roughly 8 % on remittances and have repeatedly shuttered Cuba operations under sanctions pressure. Boycott their services; flood #WesternUnionExploitsCuba hashtags with embargo death‑toll data.
Fourth, endorse public accolades that flip the propaganda script. The U.S. section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom has already nominated the Cuban medical brigades for the Nobel Peace Prize. Add your organization’s logo to that petition. Every endorsement forces media outlets to print the words “Cuba” and “peace” in the same sentence—cognitive dissonance for readers fed a diet of demonization.
Fifth, practice sanctions‑busting in miniature. When mainstream banks block wire transfers for hurricane relief, we route funds through alternative platforms or carry cash on solidarity delegations. Yes, the laws are designed to terrify you; that is why lawfare is imperialism’s favorite non‑kinetic weapon. But fear melts in collective action. Pastors for Peace has never paid a single fine—popular pressure makes Treasury blink first.
Sixth, spread the word that Cuba trains—in English, for free—any student willing to serve underserved communities. More than 200 U.S. citizens have graduated from ELAM, Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine, with no tuition and a pledge to practice in low‑income neighborhoods upon return. Recruit pre‑med students drowning in debt; show them that a debt‑free medical education exists even if CNN forgets to mention it.
Finally, own our contradictions. We reside inside a state that perfected captive labor and pays prison workers pennies. We live amid gig‑economy serfdom. Yet the media tells us Cuban volunteerism is “slavery.” By exposing that hypocrisy—drawing on WI analyses like “Starving the Revolution” and “Biotech Sovereignty in Silence”—we chip away at empire’s moral armor. What was foreign becomes familiar; what was propaganda becomes punchline.
We who benefit, however grudgingly, from the spoils of hyper‑imperialism have two choices: remain spectators while Washington suffocates a socialist example, or defect—materially, politically, culturally—to the camp of solidarity. Our power is small in isolation but compounding in motion: a senate phone jam here, a caravan seat there, a local resolution, a union endorsement, an article shared outside algorithmic echo chambers. Every act widens the breach in the embargo and nourishes the world we tell ourselves we want. Cuba has done its part—healing strangers under bombardment. The next incision is ours to make—with ballots, blockades, bodies in the streets.
Source: Weaponized Information