Hoping to reach US, Cuban doctors and nurses sit in limbo in Colombia

BOGOTA, Colombia – In a working-class section of the Colombian capital, a Cuban doctor, nurses and others spend their days languishing in a cramped apartment, checking their phones for word from the U.S. Embassy.

They’re hoping to hear they’ve been approved for U.S. visas under a program that was designed to undermine the Castro regime.

“It’s very hard,” said Dr. Yosmany Velasquez Silva, who has been waiting for a visa for more than four months after leaving his job in rural Venezuela.

Velasquez has applied for a visa under the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which grants entry into the U.S. for Cuban medical professionals sent overseas by their government.

The United States enacted the program in 2006 because Cubans sent on these medical missions are considered “conscripted” labor. But now that Cuba and the United States are normalizing relations after 50 years of Cold War tensions, the Cuban health care workers in Bogota worry the visas are drying up.

Velasquez and the others were working in Venezuela when they decided to leave their jobs and cross the border into neighboring Colombia. In all, more than 700 Cuban medical professionals left their jobs in Venezuela and have been living in Bogota.

“I’m in limbo here. A migratory limbo,” said nurse Adriana Lopez Lara, who received an email denying her U.S. visa application with no explanation.

Lopez and the others are in Colombia illegally. Without a visa, she can’t come to the United States, and she and the others fear reprisals if they return to Cuba.

“We’ll be spied on, accused as counter-revolutionaries and we won’t be able to earn a living,” Velasquez said.

More than 51,000 Cuban medical personnel now work in at least 67 countries, treating millions of patients, some of them the poorest in the world.

“They go to the farthest corners of all the countries,” said Julie Feinsilver, author of “Healing the Masses,” detailing Cuba’s medical diplomacy. “They live in the slums as well as the peripheries of cities, so they live where the patients are.”

The Cubans in Bogota told America Tonight they often worked and lived in deplorable and dangerous conditions.

“They took me to a house where I was expected to sleep on the ground,” said pharmacist Katiuska Muniz Alvarez, who left Venezuela for Colombia after only 17 days. “There was no bed. It was a pad lying on the ground – with mice, cockroaches.”

Once they arrived in Bogota, things have not gone according to plan for the Cubans. The speedy visas they’d been expecting from the U.S. Embassy in Bogota were not forthcoming.

“You cross the border with the idea that it will all happen very quickly,” Lopez said.

Discel Rodriguez Vega said he suspected Cuba was putting pressure on the U.S. government to end or slow down the visa program.

“Since the program began in 2006 up to last year, it was 99 percent successful,” said Rodriguez, who signed up for the medical mission in Venezuela with the intention of defecting.

“It is not at all related with respect to our new policy with respect to Cuba,” U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said last month. “There’s no tie. No connection.”

Cuban-American members of Congress have written open letters to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, the agency that administers the program, asking for visas to be issued and using language more evocative of Cold War foes than new diplomatic partners.

“It is well-known that the Cuban communist regime sends forced labor medical personnel, against their will, to countries for its own political propaganda and if they don’t go, their families will face retaliation on the island,” wrote Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and four others members of Congress.

In the two weeks following the protest in Bogota, the U.S. government issued visas to 150 Cubans in Bogota, Rodriguez among them, according to health care workers here.

“I cried, I laughed, I thanked God. I knelt, everything,” Rodriguez said, laughing. Days later, he was in Miami.