Report of human rights violations as a policy against Cuban medical agreements in the period 2001-2016
Keywords:
Export of health services, United States government boycott strategy, Cuban medical agreements, human rights, slave laborAbstract
Since 2004, the export of health services has represented the Cuban nation’s main source of income. Consequently, the United States (U.S.) government has pursued an aggressive policy against this activity, aimed at suffocating the country’s economy. In this sense, the different U.S. administrations up to the present have developed a boycott strategy against international Cuban medical agreements that involves a set of systematic actions undertaken by different actors and on the basis of different policies. The denunciations of human rights violations related to the Cuban Medical Brigades (CMB) - centered on the slave labor message line - constitute one of the main actions, but these have not been a permanent aspect since the articulation of the strategy, and it was not until 2010 that the link between human rights and BMC began to be systematized in the anti-Cuban discourse. The research aims to explain the emergence and evolution of the denunciation of human rights violations related to CMBs in the U.S. government’s boycott strategy against Cuban medical agreements in the period 2001-2016. It was found that the organization of the discourse on the basis of slave labor as the main argument was relevant for the enrichment of the communicational component of the boycott strategy and had an impact on the achievement of its purposes.
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