What may be con­sid­ered the “acid test’ of whether Trinidad and To­ba­go is shap­ing and so­lid­i­fy­ing its for­eign pol­i­cy in its na­tion­al in­ter­est, or whether the Gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has aligned it­self com­plete­ly with the Unit­ed States, is now be­fore the na­tion.

The per­ti­nent ques­tion re­lates to whether the Cuban med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, who have been com­ing here for al­most 25 years and do­ing yeo­man ser­vice in the health sec­tor, will be giv­en re­newed con­tracts or whether they will be un­cer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly packed back to Ha­vana in the man­ner of Guyana and Ja­maica.

A few days ago, the T&T Gov­ern­ment, at the Bo­go­ta, Colom­bia meet­ing of the Com­mu­ni­ty of Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can States (CELAC), did not align it­self with the view that the “il­lic­it block­ade of CELAC mem­ber Cu­ba is a gross vi­o­la­tion” of the re­gion’s in­ter­na­tion­al­ly recog­nised de­c­la­ra­tion of the Caribbean Sea as a Zone of Peace.

The meet­ing al­so de­nounced the killing of re­gion­al cit­i­zens when the US mil­i­tary bombed re­gion­al cit­i­zens; and on this point again, T&T de­clined sup­port for CELAC.

Trinidad and To­ba­go al­so de­part­ed from CELAC’s call for the US to end its 65-year eco­nom­ic block­ade of Cu­ba, which, among oth­er rea­sons, has left Cu­ba strug­gling to sur­vive. Those con­di­tions have wors­ened over the last cou­ple months since the US in­vad­ed and cap­tured Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro and in so do­ing, stopped the Bo­li­var­i­an Re­pub­lic’s sup­ply of oil to Ha­vana.

In the in­stance of the test to come re­lat­ing to whether the Gov­ern­ment here will end the con­tract­ing of Cuban med­ical pro­fes­sion­als as a re­sult of the US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s con­tention that the con­tracts amount to “forced labour” and “hu­man traf­fick­ing,” the Prime Min­is­ter is yet to make a pub­lic com­ment.

The is­sue fac­ing the Gov­ern­ment is whether it will con­tin­ue us­ing the ser­vices of the Cuban med­ical pro­fes­sion­als or whether it will hand over its sov­er­eign pow­er of de­ci­sion-mak­ing on such mat­ters to the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Crit­i­cal­ly, there­fore, is the de­ci­sion on whether T&T will forego the ob­vi­ous as­sis­tance of the Cubans in health­care ser­vices in its own in­ter­est, or whether it will ac­com­pa­ny Wash­ing­ton in its con­tin­u­ing de­ter­mi­na­tion to bring down the Cuban gov­ern­ment by end­ing the con­tract­ing of the Cuban pro­fes­sion­als.

The con­tention of the US is that the Cuban health pro­fes­sion­als work­ing here and else­where in the re­gion are forced to hand over 50 per cent of their salaries to the Cuban gov­ern­ment. One Cuban med­ical pro­fes­sion­al work­ing in T&T cor­rob­o­rat­ed the state­ment of the Cuban au­thor­i­ties.

Es­sen­tial­ly, the pay­ment amounts to a tax, the state hav­ing paid for the med­ical train­ing of the doc­tors and nurs­es, and as a re­quire­ment, such pro­fes­sion­als who have ben­e­fit­ed from the con­tri­bu­tion of all cit­i­zens, must now make a re­pay­ment. Right or wrong, that is a de­ci­sion for Cubans and not for oth­ers to de­cide up­on.

What must con­cern us here in T&T, is whether or not the Gov­ern­ment will hand over com­plete­ly, de­ci­sion-mak­ing on in­ter­na­tion­al mat­ters to Pres­i­dent Trump and, if so, what are the po­ten­tial per­ils of that giv­en the US’s cur­rent tram­pling all over the world and its en­gage­ment in vi­o­lent wars and more.