http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=60&ItemID=7962Occasional miracles are achieved as a result of the close relations between Cuba and Venezuela, as numerous people can attest. Since June 2004, 20,000 Venezuelan citizens who had lost their sight to cataracts and other eye diseases, some of them decades ago, had their vision restored thanks to the prodigies of the Cuban revolution and its incomparable health system.1 But the international press has remained silent about the medical services performed by Cuban specialists, evidently because it is too busy covering the now-ideological subject of “human rights violations.”
Venezuelan patients who hadn't had access to medical care in their country for many years have become a priority for the government of Hugo Chávez, which decided to pay particular attention to the dispossessed. They were able to receive free operations in Cuba by virtue of the humanitarian and internationalist policies in place since 1959.
Cuba plans to extend this service to the rest of the nations of Latin America, where close to 4 million indigents suffer from eye diseases. By the end of 2005, close to 100,000 afflicted Latin Americans will benefit from the expertise of the 600 ophthalmic surgeons on the Caribbean island. No other country in the world has launched such an important humanitarian program to alleviate the misfortunes which devastate the American hemisphere.2
Beyond the 100,000 foreign patients treated every year in Cuba, the Havana government currently accepts more than 76,000 students from poor countries, offers them a high-level university education and covers all of the costs. Close to 6,000 new foreign students will be accepted next year. The Latin American Medical School of Havana is one of the most famous in the Americas and has trained tens of thousands of health professionals from more than 123 countries.3
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