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'It Is Unspeakable': How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/world/americas/venezuela-cuban-doctors.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur----------------------------
But he said his Cuban and Venezuelan superiors told him to use the oxygen as a political weapon instead: Not for medical emergencies that day, but to be doled out closer to the election, part of a national strategy to compel patients to vote for the government.
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In interviews, 16 members of Cuba’s medical missions to Venezuela — a signature element of relations between the two countries — described a system of deliberate political manipulation in which their services were wielded to secure votes for the governing Socialist Party, often through coercion.
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The Cuban doctors said they were ordered to go door-to-door in impoverished neighborhoods, offering medicine and warning residents that they would be cut off from medical services if they did not vote for Mr. Maduro or his candidates.
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Another Cuban doctor in Barinas offered the same account: that government employees, dressed as physicians, were sent out with medicine to get votes.