The Dominion - cuba

Cuba at 50 - In Photos

Geordie — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:40:31 +0000

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Photos by Gwalgen Geordie Dent and Sharmeen Khan

1. The backdrop to the Cuban anniversary celebration in Havana.

2-4. The 50th anniversary celebration. Reported in The Miami Herald the next day: "No big celebrations in Havana Cuba on the 50th anniversary of the Revolution."

5. Cuban cars. The economy has picked up with more petrol, automobiles and consumer goods.

6. A "Cuban 5" sympathy banner in Havana.

7. Quotes by Fidel on a wall in Santiago de Cuba

8. Cuban oil fields. Cuba recently found major deposits of tar-sands-like oil off the coast.

9. Pastors for Peace Caravan

10-11. 50th anniversary billboards in Santiago de Cuba near the Moncada: a major revolutionary-historical monument. Cuba has little to no commercial advertising.

12. The square in Santiago de Cuba where the revolution was officially launched 50 years ago. Raul Castro spoke here 2 days later for the anniversary.

¡Salud! tells the story of Cuba's medical internationalism

dru — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 21:21:36 +0000

Film Review

[This article originally appeared in Seven Oaks Magazine]

Michael Moore’s Sicko, an incendiary expose of the for-profit health care system in the United States, generated some predictable backlash from right-wing pundits. More than anything else in the film, what tended to get them especially enraged was the role of Cuba in the documentary.

After comparing and contrasting the US system with health care in Canada, Britain and France, Moore delivers the coup de grace by taking a number of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba to get treatment for work-related illnesses that the U.S. system would not cover. These scenes feature friendly Cuban medical professionals providing free, quality care to the sick 9/11 heroes so shamefully neglected by their own government. Contrary to the hysterical claims of Moore’s critics, these acts of generosity were not mere propaganda set-ups; in reality, the provision of free treatment for the 9/11 workers only scratches the surface of Cuba’s exemplary medical internationalism.

Director Connie Field’s Salud! picks up from Moore’s Sicko with a documentary that examines Cuba’s long and elaborate history of exporting the gains of socialized medicine. In addition to telling an inspiring story that has received next to no mainstream media coverage in the western world, Salud! also presents an important debate, counterposing two very different philosophies as to what it means to be a physician.

Field’s documentary begins with some of the basic history of the Cuban revolution. The dire state of health care, especially in the countryside, was a factor in bringing about a mass movement and fuelling support for the guerrilla army that toppled Batista in 1959. In the early 1960s, free health care became a right for all Cubans, and a rapid process of training new health professionals was undertaken. Within only a few years, Cuba began to send brigades of medical volunteers to allies and various needy Third World countries. The extent of Cuba’s “doctor diplomacy,” as it has been called, is truly staggering. Over the past five decades, more than 100 000 Cuban medical professionals have served abroad, often in the most remote, isolated and impoverished locations.

Salud! covers a lot of ground for a medium-length documentary, highlighting the accomplishments of Cuba’s doctors in The Gambia, South Africa, Central America, and Venezuela. To its credit, the documentary lets the story unfold primarily through the observations of the doctors and patients themselves, supplemented by some experts in the field, such as the innovative and tireless internationalist Dr. Paul Farmer.

The segments in Africa are particularly poignant. We see experienced Cuban doctors literally reduced to tears by the extreme poverty and suffering of their patients. In The Gambia, the Cubans have helped to build a basic health care system from the ground up, beginning with simple measures to reduce the scourge of malaria. In many cases, following their community health model, Cuban doctors live in small villages that have never before had the benefit of medical attention.

In South Africa, while many of the local doctors and private practitioners live like kings, the country’s health care system is stressed beyond its limits by the AIDS crisis and a lack of personnel and funding. In one scene, we see a Cuban physician who has “defected” from his compatriots’ team in South Africa. Now in private medicine, the born-again capitalist happily shows off his mansion and boasts of his new lifestyle in “a white neighbourhood”. A Cuban medical official explains that only roughly 2% of all of their internationalist physicians have left to pursue this more lucrative type of medicine. South African and other African health officials, for their part, complain of a much higher percentage of “brain drain” with their graduates, as they watch helplessly as doctors are lured by contracts from North America and Europe.

In Venezuela, too, the film demonstrates the clash of medical philosophies between the Cubans and the local physicians. When the government of Hugo Chavez initiated community health clinics in the poorest barrios, Venezuelan doctors refused to sign on, so the government called in thousands of willing Cubans to do the job. Now, for the first time, the barrios around Caracas have doctors living and working in poor communities.

The last segment of Salud! covers the incredibly ambitious efforts of Cuba to offer free medical training to students from throughout Latin America, Africa, and – believe it or not – even the United States. Some of the most delightful interviews in the film are with these young students. In two notable cases – a young man from rural Honduras and a dynamic young woman from a barrio in Caracas – the students tell of being inspired to become doctors after witnessing the selfless efforts of Cuban doctors in their communities.

The thousands of students receiving medical training in Cuba represent a real hope for developing a ‘New Doctor’ for the 21st century, not driven by a desire for money or social status, but instead motivated to serve those in need and live as an equal with those in his or her community.

Salud! is an important documentary, and not just because it deals with one of the great and almost unknown accomplishments of the Cuban revolution. The film also confronts crucial issues about our collective right to health care in a world where so many still die needless, preventable deaths because of the greed or indifference of others.

» ¡Salud!: Official Site

Images from Salud

US Terrorism Against Cuba

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 19:30:08 +0000

An excerpt from International Terrorism: Image and Reality

Anti-Cuban terrorism was directed by a secret Special Group established in November 1961 under the code name "Mongoose," involving 400 Americans, 2,000 Cubans, a private navy of fast boats, and a $50 million annual budget, run in part by a Miami CIA station functioning in violation of the Neutrality Act and, presumably, the law banning CIA operations in the United States. These operations included bombing of hotels and industrial installations, sinking of fishing boats, poisoning of crops and livestock, contamination of sugar exports, etc. Not all of these actions were specifically authorized by the CIA, but no such considerations absolve official enemies.

Several of these terrorist operations took place at the time of the Cuban missile crisis of October-November 1962. In the weeks before, Raymond Garthoff reports, a Cuban terrorist group operating from Florida with US government authorization carried out "a daring speedboat strafing attack on a Cuban seaside hotel near Havana where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans;" and shortly after, attacked British and Cuban cargo ships and again raided Cuba, among other actions that were stepped up in early October. At one of the tensest moments of the missile crisis, on November 8, a terrorist team dispatched from the United States blew up a Cuban industrial facility after the Mongoose operations had been officially suspended. Fidel Castro alleged that 400 workers had been killed in this operation, guided by "photographs taken by spying planes." This terrorist act, which might have set off a global nuclear war, evoked little comment when it was revealed. Attempts to assassinate Castro and other terror continued immediately after the crisis terminated, and were escalated by Nixon in 1969.

Such operations continued after the Nixon years. In 1976, for example, two Cuban fishing vessels were attacked in April by boats from Miami, the main center of anti-Cuban terrorism worldwide. A few weeks later, the Cuban embassy in Portugal was bombed with two killed. In July, the Cuban mission to the UN in New York was bombed and there were bombings aimed at Cuban targets in the Caribbean and Colombia, along with the attempted bombing of a pro-Cuban meeting at the Academy of Music in New York. In August, two officials of the Cuban embassy in Argentina were kidnapped and Cubana airlines offices in Panama were bombed. The Cuban embassy in Venezuela was fired upon in October and the embassy in Madrid was bombed in November. In October, CIA-trained Cuban exiles bombed a Cubana civilian airliner, killing all 73 aboard, including Cuba's gold-medal-winning international fencing team. One of the agents of this terrorist operation, Bay of Pigs veteran Luis Posada Carriles, was sprung from the Venezuelan jail where he was held for the bombing; he mysteriously escaped and found his way to El Salvador, where he was put to work at the Ilopango military airbase to help organize the US terrorist operations in Nicaragua. The CIA attributed 89 terrorist operations in the US and the Caribbean area for 1969-79 to Cuban exile groups, and the major one, OMEGA 7, was identified by the FBI as the most dangerous terrorist group operating in the US during much of the 1970s.

"CIA-sponsored operations included bombing of hotels and industrial installations, sinking of fishing boats, poisoning of crops and livestock, contamination of sugar exports..."