Doctors from Cuba stay amid Haiti revolt

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — At the height of the bloody revolt in this country, all the hospitals and clinics in the capital closed but one, a makeshift emergency room operated entirely by Cuban doctors.

"We're here to help the people," said Juan Carlos Chavez, chief of a 535-person Cuban medical brigade in Haiti. "We don't take sides. We don't get mixed up in politics."

Over the past 41 years, the Cuban government has sent tens of thousands of doctors to dozens of nations as part of its vaunted doctor diplomacy program. Some say it's evidence of the Castro government's unselfish commitment to health care. But others charge that doctor diplomacy is simply a way for Cuba to bring in desperately needed hard currency. The bulk of the money paid by the nations goes to the government, not the doctors, they say.

"These doctors are in essence slave labor. They're sold on the international market to fill a need in the Third World. But the net beneficiary is the Cuban regime," said Joe Garcia, head of the Cuban American National Foundation, an influential anti-Castro group in Miami.

"Cuban life in general is so miserable that only Cuban professionals would think that it is a step up to practice medicine in Haiti, Zaire, Mozambique and other impoverished Third World nations," Garcia said.

Haitian patients treated by Cubans in Port-au-Prince said they were grateful to find doctors who endured the bedlam that erupted after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide left the country Feb. 29.

"I don't know what I would have done without these Cuban doctors," said Parnel Gilbert, 52, a man being treated for an infection that had eaten away the skin of his feet. "I'm very happy."

The violence peaked after Aristide fled. Haitian hospitals hastily shut down, and Doctors without Borders and other aid groups stopped their work, saying it was too dangerous to continue.

The Cubans tended patients despite the threat, Chavez said. They cleared out a large storeroom, cleaned the floors and brought in a half dozen cots. Soon the patients started arriving, many bleeding, limping and near collapse.

There were 22 gunshot victims on Feb. 29 and March 1 alone. And as the week progressed, Cuban doctors treated more than 100 people, Chavez said.

Looters rushed the hospital grounds at one point and stole six cars and trucks, but they left the Cuban doctors alone.

"The people have always protected us," Chavez said. "We're here to take care of people's health."

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Cuban doctors are posted throughout Haiti, providing health care to 75 percent of the nation's 8.3 million people.

"To have an idea of how significant their work is, one should be aware that Haiti has less than 2,000 doctors and almost 90 percent of them are ... in the capital," Perez told a gathering of Caribbean diplomats on Feb. 12.

Over the past five years, Perez said, Cuban doctors have treated nearly 5 million Haitians, assisted with about 45,000 births and performed 59,000 operations.

Cuban officials estimate their doctors have saved nearly 86,000 lives and forced a drop in Haiti's infant mortality rate.

Sometimes doctors sent abroad seize the opportunity to defect. In one case in 2000, two Cuban doctors in Zimbabwe headed to a U.N. office in that country, and ended up in the United States.

Some Cubans have complained that local clinics are short-handed because of the many doctors sent abroad. But Cuban officials dispute that. And the World Health Organization says Cuba still has a huge number of doctors — about 530 for every 100,000 residents, third behind Monaco with 664 and Italy with 554.

Said Garcia: "Cuba has more doctors than it has heads of lettuce."