|
The New Yorker article highlights
Cuba’s Ebola Diplomacy
“In
a sense, all of these countries are following the
lead of Cuba,” wrote journalist Jon Lee Anderson in
an article Publisher on November 4 in the
prestigious magazine The New Yorker, entitled
“Cuba’s Ebola Diplomacy,” in which he discusses
Cuba’s contribution to the fight against Ebola.
The
article recalls that on September 12, “President
Raúl Castro’s health minister announced that Cuba
would send nearly five hundred health-care
professionals to West Africa.
“No
other country, to date, has contributed as many
trained health-care professionals to the Ebola
crisis as Cuba has,” it adds.
“Cuba has long been known for its roving teams of
medical doctors and nurses. Indeed, Cuba, an island
nation of eleven million people, with eighty-three
thousand trained doctors—one of the highest
proportions of doctors in the world—has become
something like the world’s first responder to
international crises in recent years. It dispatched
hundreds of Cuban medical personnel to Pakistan
after an earthquake in 2005 and to Haiti following
the catastrophic 2010 earthquake there, as well as
to other far-flung emergencies.
This
is the result of a long-term strategy that the Cuban
government has pursued since seizing power in 1959.”
It
continues reporting that hundreds of thousands of
students from Africa, Asia, Latin America and even
the U.S. have been educated at the Latin American
School of Medicine. “In 2013, an estimated nineteen
thousand five hundred students from more than a
hundred countries were said to be enrolled there.”
Health is a source of revenue, and pride, for the
country, the article states, adding that when the
government called for volunteers to join the fight
against Ebola, “It was deluged with more than
fifteen thousand volunteers. In addition to
deploying intensive-care doctors and nurses, the
Cuban teams in West Africa include surgeons,
anesthesiologists, epidemiologists, and
pediatricians, in an attempt to provide a
comprehensive range of health care.
“Cuba’s outsize gesture in West Africa has not gone
unnoticed, and may pave the way for the start of
some Ebola diplomacy between Havana and Washington,”
commented Lee Anderson.
“On
October 19th, Secretary of State John Kerry named
Cuba as a nation that had made an “impressive”
effort in the anti-Ebola campaign.” It recounts that
ten days later, two U.S. officials representing the
CDC. attended a Havana conference on Ebola,
organzied as a result of the ALBA-TCP Summit on the
issue.
Raúl
Castro said, pointedly, “Cuba is willing to work
side by side with all nations, including the U.S.,
in the fight against Ebola.” UN ambassador, Samantha
Power, after returning from a trip to the African
countries affected, also emphatically praised the
Cuban mission.
The
Ebola diplomacy follows a friendly handshake that
Raul Castro and President Obama exchanged at Nelson
Mandela’s funeral in South Africa last December, and
has added to anticipation that the Obama
Administration may seek to finally lift the
remaining restrictions in the United States’ trade
embargo against Cuba,” the article states.
Lee
Anderson concludes by stating that, removing the
blockade “would pave the way for a full restoration
of diplomatic relations.” (The New Yorker)
|
