The U.S. State Department, in a statement to Breitbart News on Thursday, denied complaints from the Communist Party of Cuba that visa restrictions on members of the violent regime would prevent Cuba from being an active participant in the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional body of the World Health Organization (W.H.O.).
PAHO is currently holding a “Directing Council” meeting in Washington, DC, that the United Nations agency states on its website will “serve as a key platform to discuss and adopt policies and strategies that will define regional health priorities.” PAHO regularly boasts of “cooperation” with the Cuban communist regime and was ordered to face a lawsuit in 2022 by enslaved Cuban doctors alleging that the agency helped Cuba facilitate the trafficking of health workers to Brazil.
Cuba’s Deputy Health Minister Tania Margarita Cruz issued statements this week to the regime propaganda outlet Prensa Cubana complaining that she did not receive a visa to enter the United States and attend the meeting, alleging “discrimination.” The State Department contends, in turn, that refusing to issue visas to some of the world’s most repressive government officials is in the national security interests of the United States and does not actually prevent Cuba from participating in the meeting since other Cuban diplomats with U.S. visas are already based at their Communist Party’s embassy in Washington.
“No restrictions prevented representatives of the illegitimate Cuban regime who work in their Embassy from attending the PAHO meeting,” a State Department spokesperson told Breitbart News. “Travel restrictions on representatives of the Cuban dictatorship protect U.S. national security interests. For information on attendance, we refer you to the Pan American Health Organization.”
Cruz, the Cuban health official, described her personal inability to obtain a visa as “discrimination” against Cubans generally.
“This action constitutes discrimination against Cuba, a country that is a full and active member of PAHO,” Cruz claimed. “Far from fulfilling its obligations as host country, the United States is taking advantage of that status to try to silence Cuba’s voice, aware that it has no legitimate arguments to disagree with our positions.”
In reality, no obstacle exists to the Cuban communist regime elevating its voice at that meeting, as other Cuban officials are already present in Washington. The U.S. government under President Donald Trump has, however, emphasized efforts to condemn and thwart Cuba’s lucrative slave doctor system in which it “rents” its health workers to poor countries for a fee, most of which the doctors do not get a cut from. The State Department reiterated in its 2025 Trafficking in Persons report, published this week, that evidence indicates Cuba is engaging in forced labor, a form of modern slavery, and human trafficking through its “medical missions.”
“During the reporting period there was a ‘government policy or pattern’ of forced labor in the government’s labor export program, which included medical missions, from which the regime profited,” the report read. It documented the existence of 26,000 Cuban slave workers in over 55 countries. While the respective fields in which the Cuban slaves were trafficked were diverse — “teachers, athletes and coaches, artists, musicians, architects, engineers, forestry technicians, construction workers, and almost 7,000 sea mariners” — the medical program is believed to be the most profitable for the Communist Party.
Speaking to Breitbart News in conversation last week, a senior State Department official described efforts to diminish the influence and scope of abuse of the Cuban slave doctor operations as a priority for the U.S. government in diplomacy with third-party countries who have participated in the program. In the Western Hemisphere, the official posited, countries “have figured out that this is basically the Cubans… almost enslaving people and then renting them to the benefit of the regime, rather than to the individual doctors or medical professionals.”
“The dilemma for some of the countries is that they don’t have doctors, so we have been working with them and trying to come up with ways that, if they are going to have Cuban doctors, where they make the deals with the doctors individually,” the State Department official explained, “where the doctor has their own bank account and is able to dispose of the money that they make themselves rather than having the regime take it and then give them a pittance, which was the original model.”
Even countries using all safeguards available to protect Cuban doctors from their own government, however, found that “the Cubans were using coercion to force the doctors to cough up the money,” the official added.
The State Department announced the restriction of officials in third-party countries who aided the Cuban slave doctor scheme in August, particularly from Grenada and several African countries, in response to the human rights abuses inherent in the program.
“The United States will not remain silent as the criminal Cuban regime unjustly enriches itself through its exploitative and coercive medical labor export scheme,” a senior State Department official told Breitbart News at the time. “We will continue going after anyone responsible for or involved in the forced labor of Cuban doctors until their passports are not withheld by the regime and their wages are not stolen.”
PAHO is specifically implicated in helping broker an agreement between Cuba and the leftist government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, appearing as a party to a lawsuit filed in U.S. court by slave doctors who escaped their government. According to the Miami Herald, the original 2018 lawsuit accused PAHO of making as much as $74 million as a party to agreements between Cuba and Brazil. In 2022, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that PAHO must face the lawsuit.
Doctors who have escaped the slavery scheme have described having their individuals rights stripped, being forced to give up passports and other key documentation, and falsifying medical data to make the program appear more productive than it is.
“Since we weren’t seeing any real patients, medication wise, we had to correlate the medication prescriptions to these patients who didn’t exist, so we had to destroy medicine to keep up,” Ramona Matos, a Cuban doctor who served in Bolivia, testified at a press conference in 2019. “You had to burn them, disappear them, however you could get rid of it [the medicine].”
Tatiana Carballo, another doctor, said the Cuban regime explicitly told the doctors, “We are their property.”
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
Read the full article here