If Mr Rubio possesses a scintilla of decency, he should immediately rescind the policy, whose hurt will be felt not only by Cuba, but by poor people in Africa, Asia and the Americas, including several Caribbean countries, Jamaica among them.

It will cost lives, and, possibly, the unintended consequence of adding to the factors that drive illegal migrants from their home countries to the United States. Which is something the Trump administration is vehemently against.

But since Mr Rubio and his boss, President Donald Trump, may not have immediately appreciated the damage they are likely to inflict, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the economic cooperation association of regional countries, is right to seek, as a group, to explain the situation to the administration.

“… CARICOM foreign ministers are arranging a meeting with the US special envoy for our region, to take place in Washington in the second week of March”, said the Trinidad and Tobago foreign minister, Amery Browne, after a meeting of the community’s Council for Foreign and Community Relations, a foreign policy coordinating body.

This is precisely the joined-up approach to dealing with the unpredictability of the Trump administration that this newspaper has recommended to CARICOM, conscious that attempting to cut individual, issue-by-issue, one-off deals with the Americans is not a viable option.

It is either the region, as the saying goes, hangs together or hang separately. In a sense, this is the community’s first test of that strategy.

It is not clear who will comprise CARICOM’s delegation for the Washington talks. Presumably, they expect to meet Barbara A. Feinstein, a career diplomat, who is still listed on the State Department’s website as deputy assistant secretary for Caribbean Affairs and Haiti, a post she has held since 2022.

However, given the uncertainty and upheaval being wrought by Mr Trump in America’s bureaucracy, including the foreign policy establishment, a fortnight is a long time.

Last week, Mr Rubio, the secretary of state and anti-Cuba hawk in the Trump administration, announced the extension of the US’s Cuba visa-restriction policy to officials involved in Havana’s overseas medical mission program, “including foreign government officials” and their families.

That, on its face, suggests that officials in over 50 countries, including Jamaica, where nearly 25,000 Cuban doctors and nurses, so-called medical brigades, now work could be subjected to sanctions for alleged complicity with forced labor.

“Cuba continues to profit from the forced labor of its workers, and the regime’s abusive and coercive labor practices are well documented,” the State Department said. “Cuba’s labor export programs, which include the medical missions, enrich the Cuban regime, and in the case of Cuba’s overseas medical missions, deprive ordinary Cubans of the medical care they desperately need in their home country. The United States is committed to countering forced labor practices around the globe.”

Like most rational people, we do not see it that way.

Indeed, there is little question of the mutual advantage of the Cuban medical program in a country like Jamaica, which is severely short of doctors and nurses. Large numbers of the latter group are each year recruited from the island to work in the United States and other developed countries, straining a system where the nurse-to-population ratio is 1.7 to 1,000, compared to the global average of 4.9 to 1,000.

With respect to doctors, Jamaica has 0.7 per 1,000 population. That includes dentists. The global average is close to three, weighed heavily in favor of developed countries, such as the United States, whose doctor-to-population ratio is 2.8:1,000. In Cuba it is over 5.9.

It is in that context that Jamaica, like many developing countries, has participated in Cuba’s medical mission scheme, which sends hundreds of healthcare professionals to work in the island, while they maintain their substantive jobs in the Cuban health system.

It is estimated that in 2023, Cuba earned over US$6.3 billion in cash and kind from this arrangement, including oil from Venezuela, which has been among the first targets for America’s latest action.

Mr Rubio, a Cuban-American, and other anti-Cuban hawks, see the scheme as a lifeline for the Cuban government.

But where Mr Rubio and the other hawks see mere spastics in a cynical political calculus to defeat Cuba’s communist government, this newspaper sees the thousands of poor Jamaicans whose cataracts and pterygium are removed each year at clinics at the Kingston Public Hospital.

We see, too, the patients at hospitals and clinics in St Mary, or St James, or St Ann, or St Mary who have attending doctors and nurses because there are Cuban healthcare professionals in Jamaica.

There is no evidence that these professionals are being trafficked, or monitored by Jamaican security agents.

Maybe the CARICOM team should invite Mr Rubio to visit hospitals or clinics in Kingston, or maybe Kingstown, for a first-hand view of the situation.