Left I on the News

One of the subjects discussed by Cuban Foreign Felipe Perez Roque yesterday at the U.N. (see post below) was how the U.S. economic warfare against Cuba had recently been directed against Cuba's medical efforts to help the peoples of the world. This article from a recent edition of the Sydney Morning Herald provides some insight into that same subject:

Cuba has been flooding some poorer parts of the region with doctors and humanitarian workers since the tsunami tragedy in Indonesia on Boxing Day, 2004. Swathes of the Pacific, from Kiribati to East Timor, are becoming dependent on Cuban medical aid, and the Cubans appear to be winning hearts and minds. Following the Java earthquake in May, teams of doctors were quickly flown to affected areas.

Indonesia's regional health co-ordinator, Ronny Rockito, said the two Cuban field hospitals and 135 workers made a bigger impact on the humanitarian crisis than the work of any other country.

"I appreciate the Cuban medical team; their style is very friendly and their medical standard very high," Mr Rockito said. "Everything is free and [there is] no support from my government. We give thanks to [Cuban President] Fidel Castro. Many villagers begged the Cuban doctors to stay."

Aside from the rather poorly-chosen image of Cuban doctors "flooding" a region hit by a tsunami, a fair picture of what's going on. Now here's the first paragraph of the article, which precedes the excerpt above:

Cuba, one of the world's few surviving communist nations, is quietly expanding relations in the Pacific region, and Canberra and Washington are said to be watching developments with concern.

As Granma comments:

Fearing the example of commitment, solidarity and unselfishness that has earned the physicians the gratitude and respect of the people in the nations where they are working, the "concerns" are an irrefutable demonstration of the two countries’ "vocation" to defend human rights.