Missing from the media: Cuban aid to Haiti

While there was no end to coverage by the international media of the aid efforts of the US and other Western countries in Haiti, there was barely a mention of the fact that the country that provided the largest medical contingent was a small Third World country - Cuba.

Tom Fawthrop

IF you have been watching BBC or CNN or getting your news from major Western news agencies - Reuters, AP or the French agency AFP - you will probably know that aid to Haiti after the 7.3-magnitude earthquake has flowed in from all over the globe.

 However, the mainstream media have invariably concentrated their coverage on the familiar  participants. Apart from their in-built bias, they tend to depend on Western aid agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to provide the stand-ups before TV cameras and narrate the humanitarian aid story.

But in confining  90% of their  coverage to US troops controlling the airport, the UN and Western NGOs, the global  TV channels  somehow  missed the largest medical  contingent in Haiti with their  three hospitals, five new fully equipped field hospitals (based on massive tents) and  five diagnostic  centres. 

Yes, Cuban doctors are also there - over 400 of them. In addition there are more than 300 Haitian doctors trained in Cuba working with them. And now another 200 Cuba-trained doctors from some 20 countries in Africa and the Americas have joined them in an impressive display of solidarity.     

You would think that all those TV cameras could hardly miss so many Cuban doctors on the ground! They easily outnumbered the medical contingents of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and Medecins Du Monde (Doctors of the World).

Public health experts say the Cubans were the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and to revamp hospitals immediately after the earthquake struck.

'It is striking that there has been virtually no mention in the media of the fact that Cuba had several hundred health personnel on the ground before any other country,' said David Sanders, a professor of public health from Western Cape University in South Africa.

The Cuban team coordinator in Haiti, Dr Carlos Alberto Garcia, says the Cuban doctors, nurses and other health personnel have been working non-stop, day and night, with operating rooms open 18 hours a day. Yet international media have paid only scant attention to them.

   During a visit to La Paz hospital in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Dr Mirta Roses, the director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), which is in charge of medical coordination between the Cuban doctors, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a host of health sector NGOs, described the aid provided by Cuban doctors as 'excellent and marvellous'. La Paz is one of three existing hospitals in Haiti that is largely staffed by health professionals from Havana. Her remarks were scarcely reported by the Western press.

The major media corporations have predictably failed to focus on the huge amount of South-South aid which reflects the solidarity with Haiti coming in particular from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The generally weak coverage of Cuban humanitarian aid missions leaves otherwise well-informed people ignorant of alternatives to Western aid.

It fosters the patronising myth that certain rich developed countries and their citizenry have a monopoly on compassion and humanitarian aid for the victims of earthquakes and tsunamis. And the assumption that it is only the Western world that can provide  solutions to global hunger and misery.

When the tsunami struck Asian countries in 2004, Havana dispatched two medical teams. The flood of wire service stories from all the countries affected cited aid from a host of Western countries, but had no mention of any Cuban doctors in Aceh (one team) or in Sri Lanka (the other team).

History of cooperation

Haiti and Cuba signed a medical cooperation agreement in 1998.

Before the earthquake struck, 344 Cuban health professionals were already present in Haiti, providing primary care and obstetrical services as well as operating to restore the sight of Haitians blinded by eye diseases.

More doctors were flown in shortly after the earthquake, as part of the rapid response Henry Reeve Medical Brigade of disaster specialists. The brigade has extensive experience of dealing with the aftermath of earthquakes, having responded to earthquakes in China, Indonesia and Pakistan.

'In the case of Cuban doctors, they are rapid responders to disasters, because disaster management is an integral part of their training,' explains Maria Hamlin Zuniga, a public health specialist from Nicaragua. 'They are fully aware of the need to reduce risks by having people prepared to act in any disaster situation.'

Cuban doctors in Haiti have organised medical facilities in three revamped and five field hospitals, and five diagnostic centres with a total of 22 different care posts with financial support from Venezuela. They are also operating nine rehabilitation centres staffed by nearly 70 Cuban physical therapists and rehabilitation specialists, in addition to the Haitian medical personnel.

 The Cuban team has been assisted by 100 specialists from Venezuela, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Canada and 17 nuns.

Havana has also sent 400,000 tetanus vaccines for the wounded.

Eduardo Nunez Valdes, a Cuban epidemiologist who is currently in Port-au-Prince, has stressed that the current unsanitary conditions could lead to an epidemic of parasitic and infectious diseases if not acted upon quickly.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive on 9 February expressed his thanks to Cuban Vice-President Esteban Lazo with the  words, 'I have to thank you for the help provided by Cuba since long before the earthquake. It is fantastic, free, unconditional, and it is in the heart of every Haitian man and woman.'

Bellerive stressed the special importance of Cuban aid - 'you didn't come to talk about building a hospital or a healthcare centre. You are talking about helping us to build a healthcare system and that is more important.'

Media silence

However, in reporting on the international aid effort, Western media have generally not ranked Cuba high on the list of donor nations.

One major international news agency's list of donor nations credited Cuba with sending over 30 doctors to Haiti, whereas the real figure stands at over 400, in addition to 300-plus young Haitian doctors recently graduated from Cuba. The combined total is now over 1,200 Cuban and Cuban-trained health professionals working in Haiti.

By comparison, the internationally-renowned Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has approximately 350 international staff working in Haiti. MSF is much better funded and has far more extensive medical supplies than the Cuban team.

    But while representatives from MSF and the ICRC are frequently in front of television cameras discussing health priorities and medical needs, the Cuban medical teams are missing in the media coverage.

Richard Gott, the Guardian newspaper's former foreign editor and a Latin America specialist, explains: 'Western media are programmed to be indifferent to aid that comes from unexpected places. In the Haitian case, the media have ignored not just the Cuban contribution, but also the efforts made by other Latin American countries.'

Brazil is providing $70 million in funding for 10 urgent-care units, 50 mobile units for emergency care, a laboratory and a hospital, among other health services.

Venezuela has cancelled all Haitian debt and has promised to supply oil free of charge until the country has recovered from the disaster.

Western NGOs employ media officers to ensure that the world knows what they are doing. According to Gott, the Western media has grown accustomed to dealing with such NGOs, enabling a relationship of mutual assistance to develop.

Cuban medical teams, however, are outside this predominantly Western humanitarian-media loop and are therefore only likely to receive attention from Latin American media and Spanish-language broadcasters and print media.

There have, however, been notable exceptions to this reporting syndrome. On 19 January, a CNN reporter broke the silence on the Cuban role in Haiti with a report on Cuban doctors at La Paz hospital.

Cuba/US cooperation

When the US requested that their military planes be allowed to fly through Cuban airspace for the purpose of evacuating Haitians to hospitals in Florida, Cuba immediately agreed despite almost 50 years of animosity between the two countries.

Josefina Vidal, the director of the Cuban foreign ministry's North America department, issued a statement declaring that 'Cuba is ready to cooperate with all the nations on the ground, including the US, to help the Haitian people and save more lives.'

This deal cut the flight time of medical evacuation flights from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba's southern tip to Miami by 90 minutes.

According to Darby Holladay, the US State Department's spokesperson, the US has also communicated its readiness to make medical relief supplies available to Cuban doctors in Haiti.

'Potential US-Cuban cooperation could go a long way toward meeting Haiti's needs,' says Dr Julie Feinsilver, the author of Healing the Masses, a book about Cuban health diplomacy, who argues that maximum cooperation is urgently needed.

Rich in human resources

Although Cuba is a poor developing country, its wealth of human resources - doctors, engineers and disaster management experts - has enabled this small Caribbean nation to play a global role in health care and humanitarian aid alongside the far richer nations of the West.

Cuban medical teams played a key role in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami and provided the largest contingent of doctors after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. They also stayed the longest among international medical teams treating the victims of the 2006 Indonesian earthquake.

In the Pakistan relief operation the US and Europe dispatched medical teams. Each had a base camp with most doctors deployed for a month. The Cubans, however, deployed seven major base camps, operated 32 field hospitals and stayed for six months.

Bruno Rodriguez, who is now Cuba's foreign minister, headed the mission - living in the mountains of Pakistan for more than six months.

Just after the Indonesian earthquake a year later, I met with Indonesia's then regional health coordinator, Dr Ronny Rockito.

Cuba had sent 135 health workers and two field hospitals. Rockito said that while the medical teams from other countries departed after just one month, he asked the Cuban medical team to extend their stay.

'I appreciate the Cuban medical team. Their style is very friendly. Their medical standard is very high,' he told me.

'The Cuban [field] hospitals are fully complete and it's free, with no financial support from our government.'

Rockito says he never expected to see Cuban doctors coming to his country's rescue.

'We felt very surprised about doctors coming from a poor country, a country so far away that we know little about.

'We can learn from the Cuban health system. They are very fast to handle injuries and fractures. They x-ray, then they operate straight away.'

A 'new dawn'?

A January gathering of donor nations in Montreal agreed to hold a major conference on Haiti's future at the United Nations in March.

Some analysts see Haiti's rehabilitation as a potential opportunity for the US and Cuba to bypass their ideological differences and combine their resources - the US has the logistics while Cuba has the human resources - to help Haiti.

Feinsilver is convinced that 'Cuba should be given a seat at the table with all other nations and multilateral organisations and agencies in any and all meetings to discuss, plan and coordinate aid efforts for Haiti's reconstruction'.

'This would be in recognition of Cuba's long-standing policy and practice of medical diplomacy, as well as its general development aid to Haiti,' she says.

But, will Haiti offer the US administration, which has Cuba on its list of nations that allegedly 'support terrorism', a 'new dawn' in its relations with Cuba?

In Haiti's grand reconstruction plan, Feinsilver argues, 'there can be no imposition of systems from any country, agency or institution. The Haitian people themselves, through what remains of their government and NGOs, must provide the policy direction, and Cuba has been and should continue to be a key player in the health sector in Haiti.'

But which direction will President Obama choose: a continuation of the disastrously imperialistic and neo-colonial policies that led to the impoverishment of Haiti and worsened this earthquake tragedy, or the promise of a new dawn in Washington's relations with Latin America?      

Tom Fawthrop is a journalist and filmmaker covering the developing world. He directed Swimming Against the Tide, a documentary on the Cuban health system, and is now working on a new documentary about Cuban aid to Africa in training doctors and bolstering public health systems.

*Third World Resurgence No. 234, February 2010, pp 33-35