HAVANA, Cuba – In a sharp rebuke of United States policy this Thursday, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez has levied serious accusations that Washington is coercing and extorting Latin American nations into scrapping long-standing contracts for Cuban medical professionals, a key economic lifeline for the island communist state. The verbal assault comes on the heels of a string of withdrawals from the Cuban medical program by four regional nations – Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, and Guyana – moves that Rodriguez frames as the end result of sustained US pressure on countries seeking closer alignment with the administration of former US President Donald Trump. For more than six decades, Cuba’s international medical brigade program has stood as both a point of national pride and a critical source of foreign revenue, generating billions of dollars for the Cuban economy each year. But the program has faced sustained criticism from Washington, which claims the Cuban government engages in forced labor by requiring medical workers to turn over large portions of their salaries to the state – an assertion Rodriguez calls a baseless falsehood. With Cuba already grappling with the imminent threat of total economic collapse, worsened by a decades-long US energy blockade that has gutted access to critical fuel and infrastructure, the loss of this major income stream represents a substantial new blow to the island’s fragile economic standing. “The US Government is persecuting, pressuring and extorting other governments to end the presence of Cuban Medical Brigades in various countries, under false pretenses,” Rodriguez wrote in a post on social platform X. Official Cuban data shows that as of 2025, roughly 24,000 Cuban doctors, nurses, and other trained healthcare workers were deployed to serve communities across 56 countries worldwide, a program that has long provided affordable medical access to low and middle-income nations around the globe while propping up Cuba’s struggling domestic economy. Rodriguez emphasized that the US campaign is not just a political attack on Havana, but a move that cuts off critical healthcare access to vulnerable populations across the developing world, all as part of a broader effort to fully strangle Cuba’s already reeling economy.