Interesting Facts on Cuba: They Rent their doctors out to other countries.

I don't support Cuba, nor communism and sure as hell would not want to live there but as an IR major I get tired of the propagandistic bullshit being spewed by ignorant Americans towing the government line.

So I'm going to start a series of facts about Cuba, just an FYI. Maybe I'll do Haiti or Germany or some other country next week.

How Doctors Became Cuba's Biggest Export
https://time.com/5467742/cuba-doctors-export-brazil/

NOVEMBER 30, 2018 11:22 AM EST
This week hundreds of Cuban doctors stationed in Brazil packed up their bags and went home, less than two weeks after their government in Havana ordered an end to their participation in the country’s More Doctors program on Nov. 14.

The program, which bolsters healthcare provision in poor and rural communities, had fallen foul of an ideological rift between Cuba’s communist government and Brazil’s far right president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro. Cuba said their decision was the result of “offensive and threatening” comments by Bolsonaro. He had called the doctors, who must send most of their salary to their Communist government, “Cuban slaves” and said their presence in Brazil was “feeding the Cuban dictatorship.” Around 1,300 of Brazil’s 8,300 Cuban doctors have already left, according to a spokesman for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the U.N. agency which oversees the program.

The political spat was an unprecedented blow to Cuba’s most lucrative export: not tobacco or sugar, but doctors. Leasing healthcare professionals to foreign governments brings in around $11 billion each year, making it a bigger source of revenue than the Caribbean island’s tourism industry. There are currently some 50,000 Cuban doctors working across 67 countries, an “army of white coats”, as Cuban officials call them. But how did Cuba, an isolated authoritarian regime that suffers regular shortages of basic goods, become a world leader in sought-after medical expertise?

Why does Cuba have such good healthcare?
Cuba’s medical export business has its roots in the years immediately following the 1959 Revolution, when rebel leader Fidel Castro overthrew the rightwing dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and established a Communist regime.

Universal healthcare and free education were fundamental to Castro’s project. “They were the two big investments of the revolution,” says Mark Keller, a Cuba expert at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “So Cuba has a really well-educated population and a surfeit of doctors.” Life expectancy on the island is higher than in the U.S. and Cubans have almost more than three times as many doctors per capita.

How do doctors serve Cuba’s international interests?
In the Cold War years, Cuba began using its doctors as a diplomatic tool to