Cuba in the Pacific
The Hive is looking on worried at six Cuban doctors working for free in Vanuatu. Presumably it is worried about some sort of communist domino effect in the Pacific, as that is the sort of thing foreign affairs bureaucrats are paid to worry about. And maybe the Hive is on to something - there are also 25 trainee doctors in The Solomons.
Now Cuba has its problems. (Notably desperate poverty and an almost complete lack of democracy!) But I’m always amazed that we don’t give it more credit for some of the amazing feats it has achieved, given it’s enforced isolation from the world. It has an enviable literacy rate and trains an astonishing number of doctors that work for good will in all sorts of countries around the world.
Unless New Zealand is going to start sending our doctors into the Pacific for free we really should be gratefully welcoming this sort of support from Cuba, rather than looking for reds hiding under the bed.
While on the topic of Cuba’s hidden successes Andrew Simms in the Guardian discusses, in the context of our 100 remaining months to address climate change, Cuba’s campaign for agricultural self sufficiency:
In terms of what is possible in times of economic stress and isolation, Cuba provides an even more embarrassing example to show up our national tardiness. In a single year in 2006 Cuba rolled-out a nationwide scheme replacing inefficient incandescent lightbulbs with low-energy alternatives. Prior to that, at the end of the cold war, after losing access to cheap Soviet oil, it switched over to growing most of its food for domestic consumption on small scale, often urban plots, using mostly low-fossil-fuel organic techniques. Half the food consumed in the capital, Havana, was grown in the city’s own gardens.
And the Chicago Tribune has more:
Chickens in Geraldo Pinera’s garden will be on his family’s dinner table soon, stewed with herbs and tomatoes and garnished with creamy slices of the avocados now ripening on two spindly trees.
Pinera, a member of a 25-family farming cooperative in this village outside Havana, tends a private half-acre plot tucked between the state-owned mango orchards where he works a day job. He raises guava, passion fruit, sweet potatoes and poultry to augment a $20 monthly income and the government ration of starches.
Like other Cuban families, the Pineras are eating more fruits and vegetables as a result of a national campaign to boost food output and curb costly imports. Their efforts represent a small but significant step toward the government’s goal to vastly reduce its dependence on more efficient foreign producers.
I’m not sure about ‘more efficient’ once it has been imported through a good embargo. While I’m not endorsing Cuba or Castro, but urban agriculture, self sufficiently free from oil imports sounds like a viable thing we could be looking at too.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Frog said: Unless New Zealand is going to start sending our doctors into the Pacific for free we really should be gratefully welcoming this sort of support from Cuba, rather than looking for reds hiding under the bed.
No, we send our newly qualified doctors all over the world to work for good money because we weigh them down so much with student loans that they can’t afford to work as junior doctors here.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:56 am
I have recently returned from Cuba.
Cuba also runs a scheme with Venezuela whereby those suffering with cataract blindness ( mainly the elderly) are flown to Havana to be operated on by Cuban opthamologists. In return Cuba receives oil from Venezuela. The scheme has been incredibly successful with many tens of thousands receiving treatment.
It is intersting that in this case the doctors are actually working on Vanuatu and the Solomons as I had presumed that the reason that the Opthamologists did not actually go to south America ( rather than the patients coming to them) was because of the fear of them fleeing.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:11 am
While I also have many reservations about ‘Cuban democracy’ (!) and the political system there, it’s hard not to be impressed by many aspects of what Cuba achieves and especially it’s internationalism and elements of progressiveness.
Even though the state has often been very socially conservative, it’s interesting that Cuba has become the most socially liberal country in the Americas by legalising gay marriage and making sex change operations free of charge under Cuba’s world leading health service. The country abolished its anti-gay laws in 1979, well before most US states (many of which retain various laws against forms of sexual activity usually associated with male homosexuality), and well before New Zealand. NZ too, has only adopted a half-way-house approach to gay marriage whereby gay and lesbians can only get Civil Unions (because Helen Clark and co thought that the sanctity of marriage meant that it should remain a heterosexual-only institution).
Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz
August 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Also in terms of Cuba’s health system and its international humanitarianism, there is a very good article from the Guardian at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/aug/16/tomfawthropcubando cs
It points out that this small Caribbean nation has, according to WHO, the world’s highest proportion of doctors per capita (one doctor for every 177 people), of which 50% are female. But more importantly, Cuba has assumed a major role in delivering humanitarian aid. It provides a nice contrast to the western aid industry and western so-called humanitarian intervention. As the article says, ‘Cuba has consistently responded to emergency appeals for humanitarian aid by dispatching plane-loads of doctors, medicine and equipment - despite the country’s own economic problems.’
Bryce
August 12th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Sounds like The Hive is looking for another round ofthe daft paranoia that we had in the 1980s when the government panicked about supposed Libyan influence in Vanuatu and the Pacific. That one came to nothing as well, no Pacific countries opted to become Islamic republics or set up guerilla training bases…
Timor Leste’s also been getting Cuban doctors for a while. New Zealand might need them soon, especially if we keep signing trade deals with specific clauses allowing kiwi doctors to go and work overseas, such as was included in the FTA with China.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Given what we know of the completely fake statistics churned out year after year by the former USSR and its satellites for decades, why do people on the left swallow what the Cuban dictatorship tells you all as being its remarkable statistics on healthcare and education?
Cuba refuses to let anyone independent have free reign to investigate and report on any aspect of the country, including interview people without those people fearing for incarceration. Why believe what Havana tells the WHO any more than what Ceausescu’s Romania used to tell it? Why evade the fact that Cuba is not an open society with any institutions that are not part of the state apparatus?
August 13th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
this is a cool doco on the visits by che guevara..and fidel castro..
..to hiroshima..
http://whoar.co.nz/2008/che-guevara-talks-about-hiroshima/
phil(whoar.co.nz)