Grads Join Cuba’s Haiti Medical Effort
HAVANA TIMES, Jan 16 — Cuba’s mammoth medical effort in post-earthquake Haiti is receiving reinforcements from Venezuelan and Dominican doctors who graduated at Havana’s Latin American Medical School (ELAM), reported Juventud Rebelde newspaper.
A Cuban doctor working in a field hospital in the Haitian capital of Port au Prince spoke with Cuban TV on the grim situation the medical teams are facing. She noted: “We are receiving large numbers of patients… many come in very poor condition and amputations have increased.”
Other reports in from Port au Prince inform that time is running out in the effort to rescue those people still beneath the rubble.
For numerous years Cuba has had some 400 doctors and medical staff working full-time throughout Haiti, the most impoverished nation in Latin American and the Caribbean. With the current situation, dozens more specialists in emergency care have arrived.
I am happy to hear that Cubans are helping the Haitien population.
Despite it being impoverished on its own with a struggling, dependent economy, the only country in the world that can offer the type of emergency and long-term medical care needed in devastated Haiti is neighboring Cuba. If the Obama administration is sincere about wanting to lead a major recovery effort I’d recommend the following:
1.) Offer to finance and expand the Cuban relief effort and provide it with the medicines and equipment needed to do the job both in the short run and over several years.
2.) Recognize that instead of being an enemy, Cuba could be a key ally in addressing serious health and education problems around the globe. If this recognition could be achieved and the adversary inertia broken, the US blockade on the island would seem even more ludicrous.