By New York Post (World News) | Created at 2026-09-10 21:15:44 | Updated at 2026-09-10 22:08:20
57 minutes ago
A group of Cuban doctors claim they were effectively sold into slavery by their country’s regime and are asking for $129 million in damages in a lawsuit.
The legal filing says 3,500 doctors were sent to Brazil between 2013 and 2018 and claims the Cuban regime earned more than $2.3 billion for their services but paid them “a small fraction” — less than 10 percent — of their earnings.
The doctors, now living in the US, claim that when dispatched abroad they were never informed 90 percent of their wages would go to the Cuban government.
They also say that while they worked in Brazil, they were under constant surveillance by Cuban intelligence and even asked to spy on their host country, according to the court papers, filed in Washington DC.
They claim they were also told if they left their mission they would not be paid at all and prohibited from returning to Cuba for eight years. In many cases the doctors claimed family in their home country were also held hostage, per the lawsuit.
They are seeking damages from Washington DC-based Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) — partly financed by the US government — which it says was the financial intermediary, charging the Cuban government a five percent handling fee for the medics’ labor.
“PAHO became the creator, manager, and enforcer of the enterprise through which Cuba shipped medical professionals to Brazil under conditions constituting human trafficking under international law and US law,” according to the lawsuit.
Ramona Matos, one of the plaintiffs, said she was posted in the Brazilian Amazon, she was subject to a 6 p.m. curfew and threatened by Cuban intelligence handlers simply for walking to a bakery to buy bread and smoke a cigarette.
Another doctor, Tatiana Carballo Gomez, was instructed to tell her Brazilian patients to vote against an incumbent mayor in Brazil and support left-wing candidates Cuba endorsed, the court papers say. When one of her Cuban colleagues used social media to complain about their paltry salaries, Cuban handlers issued a warning.
“In Plaintiff’s view, the advisors were there ‘to catch you, capture you and send you home, using the threat there were 1,000 people in line in Cuba to replace her and her colleagues,'” the court papers say.
The Cuban doctors recently scored a victory in the suit when a DC federal Circuit Court lamented how PAHO stretched out an immunity defense for several years. PAHO has also refused to produce relevant banking documents showing commissions from the Cuban doctors’ program in Brazil, court documents say.
“PAHO has cynically chosen to slow-roll the case, hide behind immunity arguments it keeps losing,” said Sam Dubbin, the Miami-based attorney for the plaintiffs.
PAHO did not return a request for comment from The Post.
Matos, Gomez and two others represent the medical professionals from Cuba who have been granted humanitarian parole by the US Department of Homeland Security and now live in the US, many of them residing in South Florida.
Since 2016, the US State Department has confirmed Cuba’s medical missions are a “form of human slavery.”
According to the agency’s 2020-2025 Trafficking in Persons Reports for Cuba, “there was a government policy or pattern to profit from labor expert programs with strong indications of forced labor particularly in its foreign medical missions program.”
