For­mer di­rec­tor of the In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, Dr An­tho­ny Gon­za­les, has thrown sup­port be­hind Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley for his re­cent po­si­tion on US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Cuban doc­tors’ pol­i­cy.

“These coun­tries have es­tab­lished sol­id re­la­tion­ships with Cu­ba, these small coun­tries in the Caribbean here use Cuban doc­tors and nurs­es be­cause it helps them a lot to get the spe­cial­ists they need. It would be hard for them to get them oth­er­wise and I find it dif­fi­cult, the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, to be­gin to tell these coun­tries that they can’t use these doc­tors,” Gon­za­les said yes­ter­day.”

While speak­ing at the cer­e­mo­ny for the prac­ti­cal open­ing of the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal Cen­tral Block on Mon­day, Row­ley de­fend­ed T&T’s sov­er­eign­ty fol­low­ing threats of US visa re­stric­tions an­nounced by Trump’s ad­min­is­tra­tion against gov­ern­ments util­is­ing Cu­ba’s over­seas med­ical mis­sion pro­grammes.