Latinamerica Press / Noticias Aliadas
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
Cuban cooperation
Larry Luxner. Feb 19, 2004
Cuba sends hundreds of doctors and other experts to impoverished
Haiti.
In a makeshift auditorium on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince late
last year, hundreds of Haitian dignitaries and young medical
students waited patiently for the arrival of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide.
While the participants sat in their aluminum folding chairs, Cuban
bolero music blared from loudspeakers, not far from the plastic
sheeting flapping in the wind that ironically advertised Univision
Channel 23 — a rabidly anti-Castro TV station in Miami.
Ironic, because Aristide had shown up here to cut the ribbon on a
new medical school staffed by Cuban doctors and financed,
curiously enough, by the staunchly anti-communist government of
Taiwan.
The ceremony was symbolic of Cuba’s growing friendship with
Haiti, which on Jan. 1 marked its 200th anniversary as the world’s
first independent black republic (LP, Jan. 14, 2004).
Located only 45 miles from the eastern tip of Guantanamo province,
impoverished Haiti is also Cuba’s closest neighbor in the Caribbean, both
geographically and culturally.
After Haiti’s slave rebellion in 1804, many French slaves and planters
settled in eastern Cuba, where they developed the coffee industry. During
and after World War I, thousands of Haitians were brought to Cuba as cane-cu
tters, but after the economic crisis of 1922, most had no option but to
remain in Cuba.
Shortly after Castro took power in January 1959, a band of Cuban guerrillas,
all white, decided to “liberate” Haiti from the regime of Jean Claude
Duvalier. In a matter of days, they were either killed or taken prisoner;
many of them were tortured. The Cuban Embassy in Port-au-Prince was attacked
by anti-Castro exiles. Duvalier quickly broke relations with Castro.
“With the triumph of the revolution, our Haitian population was integrated
into Cuban society and relations with Haiti were suspended,” said Rolando
Gómez González, Cuba’s ambassador in Port-au-Prince. “With no relations
for 30 years under Duvalier, there were hardly any contacts left between the
two countries.”
In 1991, Aristide — who had been elected by an overwhelming majority of
Haitians — was overthrown in a military coup, but restored to power three
years later under the protection of U.S. forces. In 1996, relations between
the two countries were normalized.
Now Cuba is carrying out a good-neighbor policy. “Our objective is to combat
Haiti’s extreme poverty,” said Gómez.
According to World Bank figures, 80 percent of Haiti’s 8.5 million
inhabitants live in abject poverty; 76 percent of children under the age of
5 are underweight or experience stunted growth, and 63 percent of Haitians
are
undernourished.
In addition, Haiti accounts for 90 percent of all AIDS cases in the
Caribbean, and because there’s only one doctor for every 10,000 people, the
country’s infant mortality rate stands at 93 deaths per 1,000 live births.
To help remedy the situation, Cuba has sent doctors, educators and
agriculture experts to Haiti, where they work in 95 of Haiti’s 133
municipalities.
Of the 705 Cubans in Haiti, 579 are medical specialists — pediatricians,
surgeons, anesthesiologists, obstetricians, gynecologists and others. The
Haitian government pays them monthly stipends of 5,000 gourdes (a little o
ver $100) for basic living expenses, as well as their food and lodging.
“We provide public health services, especially in cities where there are no
specialists. Our people live with the Haitians in their communities,” he
said, adding that the doctors also provide veterinary services to combat
animal diseases such as rabies.
The Cubans themselves don’t receive salaries, though their government spends
$520,000 a year to transport them to and from Haiti.
Haiti’s ambassador to Cuba, Marie-Andrine Constant, said 744 Haitian
students are currently studying in Cuba. About half of them are in Santiago
de Cuba while the rest are studying in Havana, Camaguey, Ciego de Avila and
Guantanamo.
Faubert Gustave, Haiti’s Minister of Finance, says 82 percent of all
Haitians have been treated at least once by a Cuban physician or health-care
specialist.
“When the people go to a hospital, they ask for Cuban doctors, because they
know they’ll get proper care,” he told us. “I suppose a lot of people would
be dead if they weren’t here.”
Cuba also cooperates with France in the fight against AIDS and works with
the Pan American Health Organization and ONGs like CARE to reduce maternal
mortality in Haiti.
“In three to four months, our doctors learn Creole, since the population
they attend to doesn’t speak either English or French,” Gómez said.
“Remember that 60 percent of the people are illiterate.”
This is why Cuban educators are also in Haiti, working on a novel approach
to dramatically boost the country’s literacy rate.
Fernando Fernández, from Holguin, Cuba, is an adviser to the National
Literacy Program on Radio. He directs a 21-member Cuban team that has
already taught over 109,000 Haitians to read and write Creole.
“For us, this is very significant because all the other literacy programs
have failed. We hope to teach literacy to a quarter of a million people,” he
said, explaining that classes are given on two FM stations — Radio Tem
u and Radio Guinne.
Fernández said the program is just over a year old, and is similar to what
Cuban educators are doing in remote villages from Nicaragua to New Zealand.
“It’s a universal method that can be applied to any language or dialec
t,” he said. “We don’t actually teach the classes. What we do is train Haiti
an personnel who give the classes on the radio.”
Besides health-care and literacy, Cuba is helping Haiti revive its moribund
sugar industry, which is centered on the L’Arbonnite Valley and assisting in
the development of Haiti’s depressed fishing sector.
Although Castro has never been to Haiti, Aristide paid official visits to
Cuba twice — in July 2001 and again in December 2002.
Yet Gómez insisted Havana is not motivated by ideology or politics.
“We’re doing this to help the Haitian people who have suffered so much
during the last 200 years,” he said. “We can’t offer financial assistance
because we’re also a poor country. All we can do is share our human resource
s to benefit the Haitian people.”
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Copyright Noticias Aliadas/Latinamerica Press 2002
Independent news & analysis
Editor Paloma Gutiérrez. Programmer Alfredo Yong
_______________________________________________________
From Granma International:
O U R A M E R I C A* *Havana. March, 3 2004 * Cuban doctors
attending gunshot victims * • They are to continue offering their
services in the Caribbean nation* THE Cuban medical brigade
serving in Haiti attended to 22 gunshot victims in just two days and
are working non-stop under difficult conditions, reported the
mission’s director, Dr. Juan Carlos Chávez. None of the injured
died, affirmed Dr. Héctor Torres, who heads the brigade delegation
in the capital, Port-au-Prince. He explained that they have
performed operations, including removing a projectile from one
person’s back, and reconstructing another person’s jaw, fractured
by another projectile. The doctors are staying at their posts
throughout the country, and in Port-au-Prince, the only functioning
hospital is the improvised one set up by the Cuban brigade
members, according to an official statement published in the March
3 edition of *Granma* daily. The Cuban specialists remain serene
and are working tirelessly in that hospital, now joined by Pan-
American Health Organization and International Red Cross
authorities, the statement reports. The lives of men, women and
children have been saved in that facility, now flying the Cuban flag
and the Red Cross banner, showing the way for anyone needing
help. The Cuban specialists are distributed throughout all the
country’s provinces and attend to 75 percent of the country’s 8.3
million inhabitants. The aid being offered by the Cuban personnel is
crucial, if it is taken into account that Haiti has
less than 2,000 doctors and nearly 90 percent of them work in the
capital, according to the statement. Its members have saved the
lives of more than 86,000 people, and in the areas where they
work, have
reduced the infant mortality rate for babies under 12 months from
80 to 28 per 1,000 live births, and in children under five, from 159 to
39 per live births. The maternal mortality rate went down from 523
deaths to 259 per 100,000 live births. The Cuban
specialists will continue to save lives and combat disease in this
poverty-stricken country, which is now suffering from an internal
situation that led to all the capital hospitals closing their doors, the
official statement continues. Without making any distinction in
terms of political position or the economic resources of those who
come for help, without interfering in internal political affairs, the
Cuban health personnel in Haiti are continuing to offer
their help to the population in these difficult moments, the
statement concludes.
From Cuba Solidarity Campaign:
Manchester Area group
email: csc.mcr@pop3.poptel.org.uk
Visit the Manchester CSC HomePage - http://www.cubasol-manch.org.uk for
information, events, links
37 Chandos Rd South, Manchester, M21 0TH
Tel: 0161 881 6887
Regular Meeting: every first Monday of the Month, 7.30 pm, at the Hare
and Hounds Pub: Shude Hill
(except Bank Holiday Mondays - contact us for changes)