Published Monday, March 13, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Medical school for Latins earns Cuba goodwill
By Christopher Marquis . Herald Washington Bureau
HAVANA -- After relying for decades on guerrillas and guns to export his Marxist model, Cuban President Fidel Castro has found another tool: ``doctor diplomacy.''
The Castro regime, which claims high quality health care as a pillar of the 41-year-old Cuban Revolution, has long sent its doctors abroad, welcomed health ``tourists'' to the island and developed drugs to attack some of the most stubborn blights of the developing world.
Now, even though the country's medical system is so hard-pressed that patients must show up for surgery with their own sheets and soap, Castro has opened a medical school exclusively for students from across Latin America. Free of charge, Havana plans to train thousands of new doctors from
neglected, impoverished populations of the region.
In a white-washed former naval academy by the sea, the gleaming school has provided Castro with a needed burst of goodwill from his Latin and Caribbean neighbors. At the Ibero-American summit in Havana last November, Latin leaders who strongly criticized Castro's human rights record were dazzled
by the school and clamored for more spaces for their students.
Castro obliged, expanding plans to teach as many as 7,500 Latin American medical students over five years, 10 times the original number, school officials said. In so doing, the Cuban leader may hope to inoculate himself from further regional attacks and play the humanitarian in a part of the
world where Washington has slashed economic aid in recent years.
Officials deny that the school has a political purpose, even though it siphons off resources from a struggling health system that has long waiting lists for elective surgery, shortages of basic medicines, and outmoded and broken equipment.
``We don't teach politics, just medicine,'' said Nancy Nuñez, director of the school's foreign affairs department. But she added: ``We hope they come out of this course with the same human sensibility as the Cubans who spend time in other countries. We hope they don't see medicine as
merchandise, but as humanitarian.''
HIGH RATIO
With one doctor for every 170 Cubans -- one of the highest ratios in the world -- the country has exported its medical talent for decades, usually in the service of Socialist ``solidarity'' with nations such as Nicaragua under Sandinista rule during the 1980s.
But after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 wiped out entire towns in Central America, Cuba deployed medical brigades across the region. Cuban doctors now work for free in some of the region's most remote hamlets, some of which have never had regular medical attention. Cuba has more than a thousand
doctors in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, Honduras and Haiti.
The Latin American School of Medical Sciences opened last year, after 18 Latin American governments selected and sent 1,929 of their most promising students -- evenly divided between men and women -- from mostly rural, disadvantaged backgrounds.
Most came from Central America, which has been tormented in recent decades by ideological proxy wars fueled by the United States on one side and the Soviet Union and Cuba on the other. Nicaragua sent 325 students, Honduras sent 279 and Guatemala 252. Even El Salvador, a nation that doesn't have
diplomatic relations with Cuba, sent students.
FROM BOLIVIA
Sandra Mercado, 25, with dimples and a white coat, came from Cochabamba, Bolivia. Books that would have been out of reach at $300 are given to her free. She gets up at 4 a.m. to study. She misses her family and her native food. But, sounding like the doctor she hopes to become, she adds: ``The
organism adapts to everything.''
Students live at the school, which has a theater, dormitories, 28 teaching laboratories and a post office. They get uniforms, food and a small stipend for expenses on weekends. They will remain there for 2 1/2 years, then be integrated into the Cuban system for the rest of their medical
education.
School officials say they don't know yet how much all this is costing the cash-strapped Cuban government. No one has even calculated teachers' salaries, materials and school upkeep, even though costs elsewhere are curbing basic medical services.
The largest hospital in Cardenas, a city of 150,000 in the Matanzas province, for example, closed its operating room to all but emergency surgery for a year because it did not have the proper equipment to provide general anesthesia, doctors there said. It suffers shortages of everything from
antibiotics to medication for ulcers and asthma, syringes, X-ray equipment, even sterile water. More than 200 patients await operations, the doctors said.
Cuban doctors, moreover, earn as little as a dollar a day, and many are forced to moonlight by selling trinkets or homemade rum to make ends meet.
IMPRESSIVE RECORD
Yet, on paper, Cuba's health record remains impressive, with infant mortality rates that rival those of the United States. It has eradicated diseases such as malaria that continue to plague the region.
Indeed, Cuba's reputation for capable doctors, experimental treatments and personal therapy draws people from around the world. Dubbed ``health tourists,'' these patients -- some of them desperate for cures -- shell out dollars to stay in clinics designed for foreigners or on designated floors
of general hospitals.
One of the most prominent health tourists in Cuba today is Diego Maradona, the legendary Argentine soccer player, who is being treated for cocaine addiction. Maradona, an idol of many Latin American children, checked himself in after expressing admiration for the Cuban Revolution.
With so much medical talent, Cuba turned to its doctors and researchers for cash when its economy crashed after the Soviet Union withdrew its support a decade ago. Cuba pumped more than $1 billion into developing new medicines using biotechnology, and charted some successes. They include the use
of interferon to combat hemorrhagic dengue and a therapeutic vaccine for certain cancers. Its meningitis B vaccine is so promising that SmithKline Beecham, which is partly based in the United States, obtained approval from the Clinton administration to test the drug, despite a U.S. ban on trade with
Cuba.
U.S. writers offer support, views to Cuban activist
Published Saturday, March 11, 2000, in the Miami Herald
HAVANA -- (AP) -- American literary giants Arthur Miller and William Styron met Friday with a leading Cuban human rights activist to hear his views on civil liberties in the Communist-run country and to discuss simmering Cold War hostilities that keep their countries apart.
``The most relevant thing about their visit was that it signified human support for what we are doing here,'' said Elizardo Sanchez, president of the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and Reconciliation.
Sanchez told Associated Press Television News that he gave Miller, Styron and other members of their group his view of human rights in Cuba, including what he called an increase in politically motivated arrests.
Sanchez said he and his visitors agreed that a normalization of relations between Havana and Washington could ultimately help ease the pressure the Cuban government places on its opponents.
The Americans did not comment on their visit with Sanchez.
Earlier in the day, however, Miller told APTN during a stroll through Old Havana that he thought an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba could help open its society.
``I do think it's time,'' Miller said. ``We would help them regain their standing in the world and it could lead to a freer society if we just didn't cut them off this way.''
Styron expressed similar views, saying he hoped the trade embargo would be dropped in the next four or five years.
During the trip, which began Wednesday, the writers are to meet Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly. They also are meeting with Cuban writers, playwrights and actors before returning to the United States on Sunday.
On Thursday night they dined with Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Miller was accompanied by his wife, photographer Inge Morath.
The 85-year-old playwright is probably best known for the Pulitzer-Prize winning Death of a Salesman and Tony-Award winning The Crucible, which looked at anti-Communist witch hunts in the United States during the Cold War.
Styron came with his wife, poet Rosa Styron. The 75-year-old novelist is author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner, as well as Sophie's Choice.
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