Distortions and Attempts to Undermine the Cuban Medical Brigades Will Not Succeed
by Bill Hackwell / June 11th, 2020
Every evening for the past two and a half months the people of Cuba have come out on their streets and porches to applaud and cheer for the 3,000 members of the Henry Reeve medical brigades who are fighting the Covid-19 pandemic on the front lines in 28 countries with 34 brigades. For the Cuban people these medical professionals are not just doctors going abroad but representatives of a society where health and human life are considered an absolute priority.
After two and a half months the first brigade that had been in Lombardy, Italy returned home and were met at the airport by President Diaz Canel via a video conference who told them, “With your noble gesture and your brave disposition to defy death to save lives, you have shown the world a truth that Cuba’s enemies have tried to silence or misrepresent: the strength of Cuban medicine! You represent the victory of life over death, of solidarity over selfishness.”
In the last 55 years, 600,000 Cubans have provided medical services in 160 countries and that entire time the US State Department has done everything in its array of dirty tactics to discredit them and undermine their purpose of administering health to poor people most especially in Latin America. This included the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program (CMPP) from 2009 to 2017 whose whole reason to exist was to lure Cuban doctors away from their mission with promises of passage to the US where there would be green cards and lucrative jobs waiting. It never stops. Last year the Agency for International Development (USAID), the agency that provides funds for subversion programs against Cuba, allocated $3 million specifically for projects directed against the medical brigades abroad.
The example of Cuba’s model of health care for all and sharing that view with the world sends the US and the champions of neo-liberalism into some kind of frenzy. It is the antithesis of the US model of health that excludes millions and sends others into bankruptcy to pay doctor and hospital bills. Imagine a model like that minus the parasitic insurance corporations and pharmaceutical giants who want to control all medicine and legally sell it at any price they wish. It is no wonder they will stoop to any depth to smash the prestige that Cuba maintains with the world. Can anyone think of just one sustained humanitarian mission made by the US that did not have strings attached?
More:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/06/distortions-and-attempts-to-undermine-the-cuban-medical-brigades-will-not-succeed/
