Cuba and Haiti

Many people think it is human nature to be greedy, to put the interests of the individual before the common good — in a word, to live in a dog-eat-dog society. At the same time, they may be moved by suffering and want to help others but usually find themselves stymied. Hey, that’s capitalism, what can you do about it?

Such an outlook leads to a pretty bleak view of the future of humanity.

The media, especially the tabloids and shock jocks that pitch their message to a mass audience, love to dish up examples of the most selfish and destructive behavior. At the same time, they avoid like the plague reporting on societies where socialist revolutions have made it possible for there to be serious planning and development that bring out the best in people.

Take Cuba, for example, and what it is doing to help the people of Haiti recover from the horrible wounds caused by the recent earthquake. If you live in the United States, you won’t read or hear about it in the media. But Cuba is doing more to provide its neighbor Haiti with medical help than any other country in the world.

Many Cuban medical personnel had been working there before the earthquake in facilities set up to treat the poorest people, often in the countryside, but were home on vacation. On news of the disaster, they rushed back, bringing emergency equipment with them.

By early February, Cuba’s International Henry Reeve Medical Contingent was the largest medical relief operation in Haiti, with 1,147 trained medical personnel there — including 411 non-Cuban graduates of Havana’s Latin American Medical School (ELAM), which provides a free medical education to students who agree to use their skills to help the poor in their home countries. Of those, seven were from the United States, two from Nicaragua and 402 from Haiti. Another 200 Havana-trained doctors will have joined this large team by late February, coming from 24 different countries.

Cuba’s Minister of Public Health, Dr. José Ramón Balaguer, presides over a system that provides everyone in Cuba with free, quality medical care. At a ceremony in Havana for the departure of the ELAM teams, Balaguer emphasized the long-term responsibility of the young physicians and their Cuban partners to “help build a public health system that meets the needs of all the Haitian people.”

This is no quick fix, but a long-term program to help develop and train a public health system run by the Haitians themselves.

What is the price tag on all this? Nothing. Cuba leads the way in international solidarity.

ELAM was started in 2005. Since then, it has graduated 7,290 physicians from the Americas, Africa, the Mideast, Asia and Oceania. Immediately following the earthquake, its graduates began e-mailing former classmates and recruited hundreds willing to serve in Haiti.

According to a report from Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba, which helps students from the U.S. attend ELAM, the graduates now volunteering to work in Haiti have come from South America, the Caribbean and North America and as far away as Mali in Africa. Dr. Bechri Ahmed Ali hails from the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic: “But Haiti is where I belong right now.”

“This isn’t an adventure. This is a commitment,” said Dr. Wilberth Barral, a Bolivian ELAM graduate preparing to depart for Haiti. “My classmates are Haitian. Some lost their whole families, fathers, siblings, their homes. They need our help.”

Is it possible to foresee a world in which the people of the United States could help repair the damage done by centuries of colonialism and imperialism, could gladly pay reparations to those nations whose people were kidnapped for the infamous slave trade, whose infrastructures have been destroyed in Pentagon wars, whose labor has been stolen, and whose lands, water and even air have been polluted by profit-hungry U.S. corporations?

There can be such a world. Even now, when the grip of capitalist rule and ideology is so strong, more than half the people in the U.S. contributed to relief efforts for Haiti in its hour of need. The great crime is that the Pentagon dominates the U.S. presence in Haiti, occupying the country and even obstructing medicines from getting past the U.S.-controlled airport in Port au Prince.

Cuba before its 1959 revolution was a playground for the rich and a bloody dictatorship for the poor. That socialist revolution liberated the people from cynicism and despair. It can happen here.