Vera Bergen-Gruen

speaker

49 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Vera Bergen-Gruen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ What’s News · Stunned GOP Looks to Replace Graham After His Sudden Death · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

These overseas medical missions are pretty enormous.

There are about 24,000 doctors across 50 countries.

They've been doing this for decades.

And it's a pretty well-known program in the region and across Latin America, some parts of Europe.

And they often tend to also appear during natural disasters, during the COVID pandemic when people

especially small countries or rural areas have very stretched healthcare systems.

Cuba, which invests a ton in training these doctors, tends to send them abroad almost as a, you know, soft power diplomatic mission, as well as a way to get currency back into the country.

So in 2024, economists tell us this program brought in about $5.3 billion.

We have to remember, you know, this is an incredibly cash strapped economy.

And it's a really, really important source of income and hard currency.

The Trump administration is trying to make it very costly for these governments to keep employing them.

So their main tool has been diplomatic pressure.

They've been threatening visa restrictions or other kinds of penalties for foreign officials involved in the program.

I saw this myself when I traveled with Secretary Rubio to Jamaica and to other parts of the Caribbean, where some of these communities really rely on these doctors and nurses.

These are the only medical staff that they sometimes have.

And even when they train local doctors, they tend to move away for more money.

So Rubio has really been putting a lot of pressure privately and sometimes publicly on these governments that hire these doctors, telling them that it's an abusive program and

that they are funding the Cuban regime, and that there are other alternatives available.

That's right.

The U.S.

Showing 1–20 of 49 · page 1 of 3