Left-wing Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador on Monday (May 16) defended his plan to recruit 500 Cuban doctors, in the face of anger from representatives of the health professions.
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Mexico will look for doctors in Cuba because
"we don't have general practitioners and even fewer specialists"
, declared the Mexican president.
The government estimates that there is a shortage of 50,000 general practitioners and specialists nationwide.
During his daily press conference, the president added that he did not know when the Cuban doctors would arrive in Mexico, estimating their number at 500. He solicited the hiring of Cuban doctors during his visit to Havana on May 8 with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, reported the Mexican press.
“These foreign doctors do not meet the required skills
,” representatives of some 30 Mexican medical federations, associations and colleges said in a statement recently.
The president of the College of Medicine of Mexico, Jaime Gutiérrez Gómez, on the contrary considered that there is an
"excess"
of Mexican health professionals, many of whom are unemployed.
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With revenues of $6.3 billion in 2018, the export of medical services, in addition to tourism, is one of the driving forces of the Cuban economy, according to official figures.
Cuba had made an impression by sending a team of 52 doctors and nurses to Italy to fight against Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
