Salazar urges U.S. trade chief to act on Cuban doctors in Mexico
The Florida congresswoman says the program breaks the USMCA's labor rules. Sheinbaum says Cuban doctors are paid the same as their Mexican colleagues.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, asked U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in a letter to press Mexico to dismantle its Cuban doctors program, arguing that it violates the labor chapter of the USMCA, known in Mexico as the T-MEC. President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected the claim on Friday at her daily morning press conference.
Salazar dated the letter Oct. 22. She says more than 3,000 Cuban doctors work in Mexico under a forced-labor scheme: they live apart from their families, face restrictions on movement and, in some cases, receive about 5% of their pay. Mexico's government, she adds, pays Cuba's government directly. As an alternative she points to what she says Brazil did under Jair Bolsonaro: paying each doctor's salary directly.
She wants Greer to tell Mexican authorities during the review of the trade pact that their use of Cuban forced labor violates it. The agreement bars imports of goods made with forced labor, and Salazar cites its Chapter 23.
Sheinbaum called it "false, absolutely false" that the doctors are paid less. The Cuban doctors "earn exactly the same as a Mexican doctor earns," she said, and are hired directly, with no intermediaries. Those sent from Cuba, she added, are concentrated in places without specialists.
A complaint with a history
Salazar has raised this before. In April 2022 she joined then-Sen. Marco Rubio and Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez in a letter to the Labor Department asking it to review whether the use of Cuban medical personnel broke the trade deal. It began in 2020, when Mexico City's government hired hundreds of Cuban doctors during the pandemic.
Washington has already taken a position. The State Department's 2025 annual trafficking report classifies Cuba's medical missions as trafficking and mentions Mexico's contractual agreement with Cuba. In June 2025, Sheinbaum had denied that the doctors worked under forced conditions.
What changes now is the recipient and the timing: the letter goes to Washington's top trade official, with the USMCA review in preparation. For Mexico's government, that means defending a public health program inside a trade negotiation. The letter is a request from one legislator, not a determination by the U.S. government, and Greer has not responded publicly.
