SO WE'LL ASSUME THEY AREN'T MICHAEL MOORE FANS?:

Doctors in Cuba Start Over in the U.S. (MIRTA OJITO, 8/04/09, NY Times)

While the rest of the country is suffering from a shortage of primary care physicians, Miami is awash with Cuban doctors who have defected in recent years. By some estimates, 6,000 medical professionals, many of them physicians, have left Cuba in the last six years.

Cuban doctors have been fleeing to South Florida since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, but the pace intensified after 2006, when the Department of Homeland Security began a program that allowed Cuban medical personnel “who study or work in a third country under the direction of the Cuban government” to travel to the United States legally. The program has effectively turned a crowning achievement of Cuba’s foreign policy on its head.

In the 50 years since the revolution, Cuba has sent more than 185,000 health professionals on medical missions to at least 103 countries. About 31,000, most of them doctors, are in Venezuela, where they work in exchange for cheap oil and other trade benefits for the Cuban government.

And more are in the pipeline. Cuba’s official news agency reported that more than 25,000 health professionals graduated this year, “the largest graduation ever.”

But many doctors on the island are now vying to be tapped for an international mission, in part because they know that no matter where they are sent, they will be one step closer to a visa to the United States.

"I have seen the future...and it is fleeing here."

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2009 6:46 PM