Health Minister Jerry Narace will officially welcome several health care professionals from Cuba at an orientation ceremony at Cascadia Hotel in St Ann’s today.

They are among the first of 534 professionals to be brought in to fill the gaps within the local health sector.

In a previous conversation with the Express however, Narace insisted that these professionals would not be shuffled into the system until they have been assessed and trained according to the rules outlined by the law. And even then, they would have to be supervised by local physicians for at least a year.

Additionally, he said even though the number seemed large, the group was made up of doctors, nurses and technicians, all of whom were needed to fill the severe shortage currently being experienced in all of the hospitals.

Nevertheless, health care spokesperson for the Congress of the People, Dr Navi Muradali has said that, ’many interns this year were not placed in the medical jobs they wanted and were informed that places were being reserved for foreign workers.’

This, he added, has forced to political party to believe that shortage was fictitiously made up to justify the hiring of Cubans and other foreign health workers even though many of them ’cannot speak English and posses questionable medical qualifications’.

On the other hand, four Trinidadians, who graduated as medical doctors in Cuba, will be returning home later this month in hopes of acquiring a job at one of the nation’s four public hospitals.

According to Dr Deryck Chunisingh, a medical graduate from the University of Havana in Matanzas Cuba, the students were taught the same things as the doctors who graduated from the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, and there was no reason why they should not be given a job.

Speaking to the Express via telephone from his dormitory yesterday, Chinisingh insisted that even though they ’were taught in Spanish, but we did all the same courses, all the same papers’. The other three doctors are Dr Liz Heidi Edmund, Dr Simone Crystal McFee and Dr Michele Maharaj.