[NV Greens] Fwd: Fidel's master stroke

Sun Feb 6 22:44:52 PST 2005

>
>Fidel's master stroke
>
>An oil-for-aid deal that really works
>
>As the UN struggled with the fallout from its tainted Iraqi
>venture this week, Eliecer Hernandez and 15,000 other Cuban
>doctors were busy improving the health of Venezuela's poor
>and in return sending precious fuel to their beleaguered
>island home
>
>By Marina JimÈnez and Fernando Morales
>
>February 5, 2005, Globe and Mail
>
>http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050205.wxcaracasst0205/BNStory/specialPhotos/
>
>Berta Rabelo remembers the day her life changed forever. It
>was March 14, 2004, when a neighbour dropped by her tin-
>roofed shack to tell her a doctor had opened a clinic a few
>doors from her home in Barrio La Esperanza, a shantytown in
>the southern hills high above the glass skyscrapers of
>downtown Caracas. In her 72 years in the barrio, Ms. Rabelo
>had never seen a doctor venture into this zone of open
>sewers, dirt pathways and armed drug lords, even in an
>emergency. "I could not believe it," she says.
>
>And the man wasn't even Venezuelan. Dr. Eliecer Hernandez,
>32, had come to one of the country's poorest neighbourhoods
>from Cuba. He made daily house calls - for example, visiting
>Ms. Rabelo every two weeks to take her blood pressure and
>check on her hypertension. The treatment and medication were
>absolutely free.
>
>His presence is part of a controversial "oil-for-doctors"
>program that has seen 15,000 Cuban medics set up clinics in
>Venezuela's slums in the past 18 months, and at least 53,000
>barrels of Venezuelan oil a day delivered to their cash-
>strapped, embargo-beset homeland. Properly called Barrio Aden-
>tro (Inside the Barrio), the program is the brainchild of
>Latin America's two maverick presidents, Cuba's Fidel Castro
>and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. It was launched in March, 2003 -
>to many complaints.
>
>"They are not doctors, they specialize in politics," Duglas
>de Leon, president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation,
>declared to a local newspaper. He obtained a court order
>prohibiting Cuban doctors from working in Venezuela, but the
>government appealed and the court ruled the program could
>continue while the case was argued.
>
>Today, the Cubans staff 300 clinics in the most indigent and
>inaccessible parts of a country that is the world's fifth-
>largest oil exporter but starkly split between rich and poor.
>The Pan-American Health Organization has come out in favour
>of the program, and plans to make it a model for other
>countries.
>
>The largest deployment of Cuban professionals since Angola in
>the 1970s, it is a feather in the caps of Cuba's 78-year-old
>Communist leader and Venezuela's 50-year-old populist
>president.
>
>As well, it has helped to revive the political career of Mr.
>Chavez and his mix of militarism and socialist ideals. In
>April, 2002, after only three years in power, he was briefly
>ousted in a coup led by disaffected military and business
>leaders. He was reinstated in two days, but a year later the
>government's approval rating stood at just 35 per cent.
>
>Since then, Mr. Chavez's support has increased significantly
>among the poor, who make up 70 per cent of his 23 million
>people. In August, he won 59-per-cent approval in a
>referendum on his presidency. By that time, according to
>Tomas Ramos, the director of health in Caracas, 17 million
>Venezuelans had been treated by the Cuban doctors. Cuba, in
>turn, benefited from the heavily subsidized Venezuelan oil,
>which accounts for about one-third of its energy consumption,
>according to a recent paper by the University of Miami's
>Institute for Cuban Studies. Cuba receives the daily 53,000
>barrels of petroleum products with up to 25-per-cent
>financing, payable over 15 years at 2-per-cent interest after
>a two-year grace period. In reality, there is little expecta-
>tion that the billion-dollar oil debt will ever be repaid.
>
>In the bowels of Barrio La Esperanza, patients such as Berta
>Rabelo hear little of the political debate. Before this, no
>government services had ever reached this slum, which is
>without plumbing, garbage collection or electricity. Dr.
>Hernandez volunteered for the mission, leaving his home in
>Holguin on Cuba's west coast. He says most of the health
>problems here are wholly preventable ones that vaccines, a
>better diet and proper sanitation could cure. Concerned that
>Ms. Rabelo's diet was high in fat, for instance, he signed
>her up for a government soup-kitchen program. Volunteers now
>deliver daily meals of rice, beans, broccoli, carrots and
>meat.
>
>Other patients have gastrointestinal and respiratory
>illnesses, skin lesions, head lice and high blood pressure
>caused by a diet rich in fat.
>
>"I never imagined that people's misery could be so acute.
>It's different in Cuba. I've seen illnesses here that no
>longer exist in Cuba, that is how abandoned the people are
>here," he says. For example, he recently treated a young
>child for congenital syphilis, transmitted by mother to baby.
>
>Dr. Hernandez's assignment may last as long as five years,
>and he hopes he will be permitted soon to bring his wife and
>baby to join him in the clinic. The Chavez government pays
>him $200 (U.S.) a month, plus room and board - in Cuba, he
>earns only $40 a month. On a typical day, from 8 a.m. to 3
>p.m., Dr. Hernandez runs the clinic with another physician
>and a Cuban dentist. They spend late afternoon and early
>evening clamouring up and down the steep stairs built into
>the winding hills, visiting pregnant women and patients too
>frail to come to the clinic. "The idea is to have doctors to
>look at our patients as people and not as a product, or a way
>to make money," he says.
>
>That may be the case on the ground, but for the country's
>leaders, the arrangement is very much about money as well as
>power. In 2003, Chavez reorganized the country's state-owned
>petroleum company, replacing 19,000 striking workers with
>government loyalists and cementing his control over the oil-
>for-doctors program, which many former employees opposed.
>Last year, Mr. Chavez even appointed his brother and
>political mentor, Adan Chavez, to head Venezuela's Cuban
>embassy, to deepen the "brotherly" relationship between the
>two countries. "The economic stability of the Castro regime
>depends to a great extent on the fate of Chavez's rule in
>Venezuela," conclude the authors of the University of Miami
>paper.
>
>"The loss of its Venezuelan bonanza would be economically, if
>not politically, unbearable. And that is something Castro is
>not going to let happen."
>
>[Marina JimÈnez is a senior feature writer with The Globe and
>Mail. Fernando Morales is a freelance photographer based in
>Toronto.]
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________________
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand