The President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, clarified this Monday that her Government will continue with the agreement it has with Cuba for doctors from the island to work in the Mexican public health system, begun by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), to cover the deficit in health personnel.

“We have collaboration with Cuba on several topics. The Cuban doctors we are going to continue, it is an established agreement, it has everything in order and we are going to continue with that,” assured the president during her morning press conference.

The Mexican governor indicated that next year she will seek to promote, together with the Cuban doctors, a programme to treat diabetic foot, because Cuba has a medication and a care scheme to avoid amputations that she considered very successful.

“In particular on this topic we are going to have greater collaboration with Cuba because it is the only country that has this medication and that has many results,” she pointed out.

Sheinbaum affirmed that Cuba is one of the few countries willing to send doctors to Mexico.

“No Mexican doctor is replaced, none, the problem is that Mexico stopped graduating specialist doctors for too many years,” she affirmed.

Likewise, she said that these specialists are the ones who help the poorest in the country.

“They are very good doctors, who are graduated and who are willing to come to Mexico to the most remote places. We have the obligation to care for everyone,” she pointed out.

She also said that at the moment when there are more Mexican specialist doctors, no more Cubans will be hired.

In July 2024, the Mexican Government, then headed by López Obrador, signed an agreement through which 2 700 Cuban doctors moved from the island to Mexican territory.

The Government justified the hirings because Mexico has 2.4 doctors per 1 000 inhabitants, higher than the average of 2 per 1 000 in Latin America, but lower than the average of 3.5 of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).

This past February, Sheinbaum argued that “they stopped training specialist doctors in Mexico due to a government decision” in the “neoliberal period” because the intake of students into universities to study medicine was reduced.

The president asserted then that the training of resident doctors in Mexico has already more than tripled, going from 5 999 in 2011 to 18 799 in 2025.

(With information from EFE)