Cuban Doctors in Pakistan: Why Cuba Still Inspires

[Judi Lynn]

This article was posted in response to an article posted by Mika in LBN:
600 (Pakistani) medical students off to Cuba
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3234964

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Cuban Doctors in Pakistan: Why Cuba Still Inspires
by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

The Bush administration has started to wax lyrical about the “plan” that it has in place to help Cubans move quickly toward “freedom” after Castro departs the scene. Of course given its preoccupations elsewhere, the administration is not likely to spend too much time and effort worrying about Castro’s health, unless his passing starts to look imminent. In general, and to many people’s surprise, the Bush administration has been unable and/or unwilling to respond to Castro’s recent resurgence in popularity across the Americas due to the electoral victories of a growing number of populists—some may call them genuine socialists—in countries to Cuba’s south.

Yet the imperialist propaganda machine still operates at full tilt. Misinformation about Cuba in the United States remains startlingly widespread. The term “dictator” is bandied about liberally in referring to Castro. In mainstream accounts about the island, there is no mention of Castro’s overwhelming popularity among the Cuban people. Some of the more warped and gory propaganda pieces suggest that criticism of Castro invites the wrath of death squads. In actual fact, as time has passed, Cubans have become more uninhibited in expressing their displeasure about unpopular decisions and openly criticize Castro’s past and present indiscretions.

In the final analysis, there is little said about Cuba in mainstream U.S.—and therefore many international—accounts that does not somehow come back to Castro and his “monstrous dictatorship.” There is no mention of the solidarities that characterize post-revolution Cuba, only misrepresentation of the social cleavages that Cuba continues to face. There is no mention of the incredible gains that the Cuban people have made in health, education, and other sectors of society, only an insistence that the majority of them are terribly unhappy and constantly on the look out for an escape route to Miami. And there is absolutely no connection made between the ongoing difficulties that the revolution encounters and the crushing embargo that has been championed by every U.S. administration for forty years.

For all of the talk of Cuba being wedded to the failed communist experiment and the obsolete ideals of the Cold War period, it is mainstream America that still uses the language that was commonplace at the height of the superpower conflict. Cubans who come over to Miami are “defectors” and are treated as liberated prisoners of war by the exile community. Just how preposterous such portrayals actually are is reflected in the fact that Cuba’s biggest income-earning industry is tourism—millions of Europeans, Asians, and Africans (and even a fair share of Americans) visit the island every year, none of whom are considered by their own governments to be “spies” or possible “defectors.”

Cubans’ remarkable commitment to internationalism is also down-played globally due to the smear campaign that Washington and the U.S. dominated corporate media spearheads. Cuba has sent its troops around the world in support of numerous liberation struggles, including many in Southern Africa and Asia. Perhaps even more significantly, Cuban doctors are found in the remotest of areas worldwide, serving populations that may never have seen doctors before. The most recent such episode was in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Pakistan’s mountainous region in October 2005. The Bush administration has consistently referred to Pakistan as a “front-line state” in the post-September 11 period, and one would think that the earthquake would have presented an opportunity to reward the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf for its extremely unpopular support for the “war on terror.” But it was at this time of great suffering of the Pakistani people that imperialism’s hollow slogans of neoliberal internationalism were exposed, while the virtues of socialist internationalism were plain for all to see.

Over 2,500 Cuban doctors lived and worked in the earthquake-hit zones for six months after arriving in late October 2005. For many of these doctors, this was the first time that they had been exposed to any kind of winter, let alone a relatively harsh one in an area with very little in the way of protection, particularly after the devastation of the earthquake. The Cubans developed intimate relationships with thousands of those they treated, even though they were very careful not to engage in too many discussions and debates on politics, particularly relating to the discontent that is rife against the army’s domination of public life.

For many Pakistanis, the Cuban experience was a revelation. In the first instance, there was a stark sense of disbelief that these individuals came to Pakistan of their own free will and that they stayed well beyond the point that most global relief efforts had wound down. Pakistanis found it very hard to understand the picture that the Cubans painted of the dynamics of Cuban society. They could not relate to the idea that the majority of Cubans believed in and were committed to a profound sense of social equality, especially when they compared this to the deep-rooted hierarchies that permeate Pakistani society. Perhaps more unbelievable was the notion that the state actually promoted this shared solidarity—Pakistanis know the state to be committed only to undermining such processes.

The Cubans too found many aspects of what they saw around them to be somewhat unbelievable, perhaps most of all that so many of their patients were actually seeing a medical doctor for the first time in their lives. The Cubans also distinguished themselves from the rest of the relief effort by either living in tents under the same conditions as those displaced by the earthquake, or when in Islamabad, renting rooms at the most modest hotels that they could find. This was in stark contrast to the staff of most of the international aid agencies, who not only contributed to the creation of an extremely harmful and artificial parallel economy in the earthquake areas by paying for everything in foreign exchange and doling out huge amounts of money to meet their basic “subsistence” needs, but who also tended to spend an enormous amount of time in five star hotels in Islamabad and other big cities. As with all major donor funded operations, a healthy chunk of the monies committed to earthquake relief was channeled toward the overhead costs of the relief teams themselves. Not so with the Cubans who were provided a fairly meager allowance even by Pakistani standards and shopped and ate in the working-class areas of Islamabad (hidden as they are from view by a very sinister planning process), interacting extensively with ordinary people in these areas in a spirit of great camaraderie.

The Cubans have since committed to providing training services to Pakistani doctors for free, admitting Pakistani medical students to universities in Cuba, and continuing to send Cuban doctors to Pakistan to work in under-serviced areas, a practice that was much more common when the socialist bloc still existed, but is now slowly being experimented with again in friendly Latin American countries. In some cases, such as those of Venezuela and Bolivia, the Cubans are receiving cheap oil and gas in return for their medical expertise, but in the Pakistani case, the Cuban offer of assistance was made (and accepted) without demand for something in return. There has been talk of a broader preferential trade agreement between the two countries, although there has been no explicit progress on this initiative as yet, ostensibly because General Musharraf would rather not annoy his more prized ally ninety miles to the north of the little island.

More:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1106akhtar.htm