Bahamas Won't Renew Cuban Teachers' Contracts

While students and teachers in Cuba return to class this week, Cuban educators in the Bahamas learned that their own school year will not begin as planned.

The Bahamian government announced it will not renew contracts for 31 Cuban teachers this school year — the latest in a string of Cuban overseas South-South collaboration programs to fall victim to U.S. pressure.

The Bahamas’ Ministry of Education said the priority is hiring domestic educators, though it acknowledged staffing shortages in specialized fields like welding and agriculture that Cuban teachers had been filling.

One Cuban teacher told a local outlet they learned their contracts were ending in a meeting shortly after they'd arrived in The Bahamas.

The cancellation of the teachers’ contracts follows the termination of similar agreements across the region for Cuba's medical missions, an important source of foreign revenue for the Cuban government.

The Bahamas suspended recruitment of Cuban healthcare workers entirely, as have multiple other countries across Latin America and the Caribbean since the first Trump administration began targeting the missions in 2019.

Washington equates the programs to “forced labor” — although the doctors volunteer to go on the missions and are paid many times more than what they earn in Cuba.

Bahamian Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell declined to say whether U.S. pressure influenced the decision on the Cuban teachers.