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Cuba helps Haiti remodel health care system

Published Apr 22, 2010 8:20 PM

Washington’s response to the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January was to send 10,000 troops to occupy the country and repress its population. Revolutionary Cuba’s response was to send more medical care workers. Now the Cubans are helping Haiti remodel its national health care system to provide care for the poorest three-fourths of the Haitian population.

To imagine the earthquake’s impact on all of Haiti, consider that at least 250,000 people died in a very short period of time, an unimaginable tragedy. Proportional to its population, that’s equivalent to losing 8 million people across the United States. Even before the earthquake, Haiti had the least effective health care system in the Western Hemisphere.

Now, drawing on their deep and extensive involvement assisting Haiti’s medical care, Cuban medical experts have prepared a plan for a new health care system. It was adopted at a joint meeting of the Haitian, Cuban and Brazilian health ministers in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on March 27. (Havana Times, March 31) The public ceremony announcing the plan took place at a Cuban-Haitian field hospital in Croix des Bouquets, a community a few miles due east of the Port-au-Prince airport.

In front of 400 Cuban medical staff and graduates of Cuba’s Latin American Medical School (ELAM), the Brazilian government announced that it had pledged $80 million to help build the health care system in Haiti. Brazil has commanded the U.N. forces in Haiti since soon after the 2004 coup that ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Haitian underlines importance of plan

Haitian Health Minister Alex Larsen stressed the importance of the plan: “This accord complements the trilateral pact signed among Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela, putting us on the right track to rebuild our public health system.” Minister Larsen also expressed gratitude for the Cuban doctors who on Jan. 12 “responded immediately, offering medical services and attending our dead. I truly don’t know how to thank the Cuban medical team for their extraordinary work during those days.”

Before the earthquake struck, Cuban medical personnel were already playing a huge role in Haitian health care. They were present in 127 of the 140 communes found in Haiti. Some 344 Cuban doctors were working in Haiti the day the earthquake struck.

Cuban medical staff had been helping Haiti ever since Hurricane George struck the island in 1998, concentrating their efforts in the poorest areas of this country, which lies just to Cuba’s east across the Windward Passage.

Cuba provided not only medical services but medical training. Instead of a “brain drain,” Cuba has promoted a “brain gain” by structuring its program at ELAM in Havana so that its graduates, drawn from the poorest communities in Haiti, returned home to practice. Cuba has trained 550 Haitian doctors and is currently training 567 more. (Prensa Latina, Jan. 18)

Before the quake, Haiti had the fewest doctors and nurses per 100,000 people in the Americas. Over half the Haitians got inadequate food and half had no regular access to clean water. In most rural areas, home to 52 percent of Haitians, they had no ready access to health care, meaning that sick people there died from preventable diseases.

Now, with more than a million people homeless, living in tents if they are lucky, and thousands needing rehabilitation because limbs were amputated to save their lives, health care has gone from a crisis to a catastrophe.

Cuban minister explains

Bruno Rodríguez Parilla, Cuban minister of foreign affairs, described the details of the Cuban proposal in a speech at the Donor Conference held at the U.N. on March 31. (Granma, April 1)

He said: “Generosity and political will are needed. Also needed is the unity of that country instead of its division into market plots and dubious charitable projects.

“The program for the reconstruction and strengthening of the Haitian national health care system, drawn up by the Haitian government and Cuban governments ... will guarantee wide health coverage for the population, in particular the low-income sector.

“That program is based on 101 primary health care centers which are being created, at which an estimated 2.8 million patients will be treated, 1.3 million emergency operations performed, 168,000 babies delivered, and 3 million vaccinations administered every year.

“These health centers will be supported by the services of 30 community reference hospitals ... equipped with cutting-edge technology for secondary attention, which can treat 2.154 million people per year, perform 54,000 operations ... 276,000 electrocardiograms, 144,000 diagnostic ultrasounds, 43,000 endoscopies, 181,000 x-rays, 107,000 dental examinations, and 487,000 laboratory tests.

“Given the extraordinary number of polytraumatized patients, 30 rehabilitation rooms are likewise being equipped.”

The Cubans have calculated the cost for all this construction and all these medical services at $170 million a year for the next 10 years, at 50 percent of international prices. This plan will benefit the poorest 75 percent of the Haitian people. Rodríguez called on “all governments, without exception, to contribute to this noble effort. For that reason, we attribute particular importance to this conference, and aspire to its success.”