For fifty years the Caribbean staffed its hospitals with Cuban doctors and part-financed its health response with American money. In 2026 both arrangements collapsed. Nothing has been built to replace either.
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, September 6, 2026 - In February 2026, chairing CARICOM’s 50th Heads of Government Conference in his own capital, Dr Terrance Drew defended Cuban medical cooperation against Washington’s charge of forced labour. St Kitts and Nevis, he said, pays Cuban doctors directly, and they keep their own passports. Drew is himself a Cuban-trained physician. Seven months later he was stabilised in a French intensive care unit in Martinique and flown to Florida for evaluation. Every axis of the region’s medical dependency ran through one man in a single week — and not one of those axes was Caribbean-owned.
