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Fidel receives Venezuelan military delegation
BY RENÉ CASTAÑO—Granma
daily staff writer—
CUBAN President Fidel Castro has
received a delegation from the Venezuelan Air Force
Higher Institute at the Palace of the Revolution,
comprised of officers enrolled in that institution’s
35th Air Command and General Staff Course, who have
been visiting Cuba since Monday.
Yesterday, the Venezuelan
officers met with patients from their country who
are being treated at the La Pradera International
Health Center.
A medical cooperation agreement
signed between Cuba and Venezuela in 2000 by both
countries’ presidents has enabled thousands of
patients at that institution to be treated, as
Doctor Pedro Francisco Llerena, the center’s general
director, told his visitors. Up until Wednesday of
this week, he said, 9,864 patients and their 7,856
companions had been attended to at that center.
Through this program, he
explained, 739 operations had been performed on
minors under 15, and 2,842 on adults. Of that total,
288 were cardiovascular-related operations and 153
were organ transplants; of the latter, 125 were for
cornea, 12 for bone marrow, 11 for kidney and five
for muscles.
The officers on the
aforementioned course, led by Division General Roger
R. Cordero Lara, general commander of the Venezuelan
Air Force, and accompanied by Brigadier General
Tomás Valdés Hernández, director of the Military
Technical Institute (ITM), and Colonel Josel Luis
Vega Rodríguez, military, naval and air force
attaché of the Venezuelan embassy in Cuba, toured
areas of the Health Center. They spoke with patients
and their companions about their diagnoses,
treatment and the care received.
The delegation subsequently
visited the Air Museum, a facility that exhibits the
historic traditions of Cuba’s Anti-aircraft Defense
and the Revolutionary Air Force (DAAFAR), civil
aviation and cosmonauts, according to its director,
Arquímedes Martínez.
After viewing three exhibition
halls and 27 airplanes nearby, together with
anti-aircraft artillery elements and troops, the
officers from the South American nation received a
broad outline of Cuban aviation history.
They were told about the 1913
flights by Cuban aviation pioneers Agustín Parlá and
Domingo Rosillo; the role played by Cuban pilots
during the mercenary Bay of Pigs invasion; the
terrorist attack on a Cubana Airlines passenger
plane in 1976 by Posada Carriles and his followers,
and Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, now a
brigadier general, who talked of his experiences
with the visitors.
The delegation from the Venezuelan Air Force Higher
Institute will remain in Cuba until August 15.
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