By LEANDRA ROLLE and JADE RUSSELL

PRIME Minister Phillip “Brave” Davis yesterday expressed disappointment in observations made in a recent US Trafficking in Persons Report concerning his government’s recruitment of Cuban nurses.

The newly released 2022 State Department Report on Trafficking in Persons (TIP) had raised concerns about the possibility of some 50 Cuban medical professionals who were hired by the government being forced to work by the Cuban government.

The workers entered the system back in January at a critical time during the pandemic when 116 Bahamian nurses were inactive due to COVID-19 exposure.

The report noted that while The Bahamas maintained its Tier 1 Status, there could be stronger efforts to protect potential victims of trafficking

The report said: “In January 2022, the government signed an official agreement with the Cuban government to temporarily host 50 nurses to provide medical care during the pandemic. Cuban medical professionals may have been forced to work by the Cuban government. The high unemployment rate — reported to have exceeded 40 percent — resulting from the pandemic may have increased vulnerabilities for potential victims.”

The report also noted that “the government did not report screening Cuban medical workers for trafficking indicators” and recommended increasef efforts to investigate, prosecute and convict traffickers, including officials complicit in sex or labour trafficking, and to impose sufficient sentences.

Other suggestions included: “Improve efforts to identify victims and refer them to services, particularly among vulnerable groups, including underserved stateless persons, migrants and asylum-seekers from Haiti and Venezuela, LGBTQI+ individuals, and Cuban nationals working on government-sponsored programmes.”

Responding to the report at a press conference yesterday, Mr Davis insisted that all protocols were followed to recruit nurses from Cuba, adding that no one was “coerced” to work in the country.

“In so far as that report is concerned… it’s laughable to me because they’re speaking about the Cuban nurses that we recruited and I’ve said to the United Sates and I said on behalf of the CARICOM region that our nurses are being lured away from us after we would’ve educated and trained them,” he said.

“They’re being lured away from us by the United States and Canada because their economies are able to pay them much more than what we could afford so a nurse might be making $30,000 a year and they’re being offered up to $100,000 a year or $80,000 a year to go and work in the United States.”

The Prime Minister continued: “And in the midst of our pandemic, we have seen an exodus of nurses to the United States so we ask help us and send us some nurses at least to tide us through this pandemic but they haven’t and so we went where we could find nurses and they are working at their own free will.

“They were recruited properly and they’re being paid properly and they could decide to go home whenever they wish so there’s no coercion in respect to these nurses so I was really disappointed that an observation could’ve been made or would’ve been made that the Cuban nurses here may be near some cloud of trafficking to them.”

In the report, experts also lamented the government’s lack of progress to initiate any new prosecutions, identifying fewer victims and not having a comprehensive implementation of the country’s victim identification protocol, especially among at risk groups, including Haitian migrants.

The lack of judges and prosecutors in the country contributed to significant backlogs in all cases, the 2022 report noted.

Minister of National Security Wayne Munroe told reporters on Friday that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been issues in tracking all crime across the board.

“Nowhere in the world has there been prosecutions over the last two years, including the US. The restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic has affected that.

“So, while we are mindful of the observation. I am quite sure that the US state department of government will be mindful that we’re all confronted with what they are confronted with and that is delays in the trail process, and everything from murder, which is the most serious matter on our calendar, right down to matters of trafficking in persons and sexual offences.

“We are trying to get through the system as well,” Mr Munroe underscored.

Mr Munroe added that they accept all criticism and are giving their best efforts to address the backlog in the criminal system.

He noted that he has spoken to the incoming Chief Justice about the system’s challenges and has made recommendations to address the issue.