What’s So New About Cuba’s Medical Internationalism?
What’s So New About Cuba’s Medical Internationalism?
by Mateo Pimentel / October 21st, 2014
Fidel Castro, 88-year-old revolutionary hero and anti-imperialist icon, recently published in the Cuban daily Granma that his island nation would readily cooperate with the US to wrestle Ebola. This is not the first gesture of goodwill that Cuba has made toward the US regarding cooperation, either; rather, it is one of many invitations to solidarity that happen to echo across an icy political tundra spanning years of embargo. Perhaps the newest aspect of Cuba’s long-lived medical internationalism is that, in 2014, it yet defies decades of imperial embargo. Cuba’s international medical mission yet survives Yankee economic terrorism, and does so with an outstretched hand for partnership! Other than Cuba’s remarkable magnanimity that persists well into the 21st century, there is little new about Cuba’s maverick ethos of serving the Third World and its public health.
Despite unimaginable economic hardship, Cuba has had no qualms with proffering (and actually sending) America its vital resource: human capital. Facts amassed within the last few years are worth revisiting, especially given that the size of the Cuban population is a decimal of US numbers, and that Cuba’s financial capability does not compare with America’s. Consider the following:
◾For more than 40 years, Cuban doctors have worked abroad, and Cuban hospitals have received patients from around the world.
◾Cuba has had more than 30,000 health care personnel (19,000 physicians) in over 100 countries.
◾Cuba has sent medical teams to Chile, Nicaragua, and Iran, responding to devastating death tolls and destruction caused by earthquakes.
◾An emergency medical team of almost 2,500 Cubans treated 1.7 million people affected by the 2005 Pakistan earthquake alone.
◾Cuba has sent medical personnel to El Salvador to assuage the outbreak of dengue fever, donating more than 1,000,000 doses of meningitis vaccinations to Uruguay after an outbreak there.
◾Cuba sent medical task forces to Iraq during the Gulf War (which remained there after international relief organizations left); it sent medical crews to the beleaguered peoples of Kosovo, too.
◾Cuban medical personnel went to Guyana in 2005, to aid in flooding, and also to Paraguay so as to work with infectious diseases and epidemiology.
◾Nearly 100 Cuban doctors worked in Botswana in 2005, combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
◾Cuba has also offered thousands in medical staff to work with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
The foregoing list in no way exhausts Cuba’s extensive history of medical internationalism. Again, it goes without saying that Cuba’s medical endeavors are decades old. It has been an enduring, if unofficial, pillar of the Cuban Revolution.
More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/10/whats-so-new-about-cubas-medical-internationalism/
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