Waiting for the thaw
By Varela
Last week, I read that four Cuban health workers who went to Chile to help out after the February earthquake chose to stay in that country.
On the subject of the Cuban doctors, nurses and folk healers who remain abroad I have an opinion.
The Cuban government educates them, gives them careers, costly careers that require expensive, sensitive and complicated medical instruments that they probably couldn’t afford in the capitalist world because almost all of them come from poor homes.
Yet, when they defect, they demand compensation from the Cuban government funds frozen in the United States, claiming that the Cuban state made them work like slaves.
The Cuban funds frozen by the United States are a temptation for all kinds of crooks and opportunists.
A new fauna of émigré has emerged. They’re the ones who pounce on those funds, no matter that they’re in a block of ice. The cash is more tempting than plastic credit.
In the case of specialized doctors, the administration of Bush the Fool tempted the Cuban medics who worked in third countries and urged them to defect.
The medics thought they would live here like certain famous doctors, with mansions and luxury cars (most of whom are plastic surgeons, who specialize in stretching facial skin, repairing hymens, removing ribs to reduce waists, tucking bellies and enlarging tits and asses.)
Then those medics took a leap and landed in Miami, the Mecca of Plastic Surgery (a national standing wrested from Hollywood, to everyone’s pride.)
But the medics can’t get their diplomas revalidated. In other words, the objective of the U.S. government is (has always been) to clobber Cuba, steal the talent and then the-hell-with-’em – Cuba and the medics, both.
I know one doctor (from my hometown), whom I ran across in a cafeteria the other day. Now he drives a dump truck. “Look at my hands,” he told me. “I don’t think I can do any surgery anymore, not with these working-class fingers I have.”
So, in man’s constant search for survival, he got a diploma in fund-fishing.
He has already applied for a frozen fund. He’s waiting for it to be defrosted.
I have heard that a lot of these folks are waiting for the thaw. In Miami, there’s a group of medics who can’t practice medicine but already own half of Cuba (on paper) because they claim the Cuban government made slaves of them, used them and abused them.
None of them (from humble homes, I repeat) would have been doctors, not even truckers, if the Revolution hadn’t supported them. But for the Revolution, the fellow I mentioned above would be a backhoe operator in a Sancti Spiritus farm.
Well, I imagine that with the global warming (even the poles are melting) the Cuban funds in the U.S. will thaw and these people will become rich in no time.
Of course, after they defrost those funds, they’ll have to freeze the 11 million Cubans who live on the island. I wouldn’t know if they’re slaves or not, but the Cuban Cubans are not stupid enough to let the Miami Cubans steal their island.
