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Cuba launches appeal to fight US blockade

A new campaign to raise £25,000 for basic medical supplies for Cuba has been launched by the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, to help make good shortages caused by the US trade blockade of the country.

Cuba’s free national health service has gained worldwide respect over the past 30 years. A senior Whold Health Organisation official visiting the island in 1991 described it as the only Third World country to have achieved the WHO Health for all by the year 2000 goals and called Cuba’s ‘the only efficient health system in Latin America’.

The country has succeeded in bringing down infant mortality from 60 deaths per thousand live births I 1959 to 10.7 today — a figure similar to that of the US.

Its pharmaceutical industry has made many advances, including developing an anti-cholera vaccine which will be of great benefit to those countries, unlike Cuba, where cholera is still endemic.

Cuba has also devoted considerable resources to helping development in other countries. It has sent more doctors overseas than has the WHO, concentrating on Africa, Asia and Latin America. And over 9,000 children and 1,270 adults from Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia have received medical treatment in Cuba for the lingering effects of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

All the progress in basic health care has been made despite the US trade blockage which bans the export of even a single aspirin to Cuba. Because of the transnational nature of US companies and products, Washington is also able to prevent the export to Cuba of high-tech medical and laboratory equipment, vital for operations, research and development.

But now Cuba’s achievement risks being reversed by the combination of the blockade and the economic crisis which followed the collapse of trading relations with the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. The result has been severe shortages of basic necessities such as antibiotics, suringes, bandages, cotton wool, children’s drugs and other items.

In a recent interview, Dr Carlos Carbonell of the Luis de la Puente Uceda hospital in Havana explained: ‘Our main problem is lack of important drugs. Recently we ran out of glibenclamide, essential for certain diabetics. Luckily, we were able to get some quickly, but it created a problem for several days. We also have many problems with reagents used in analysis, X-ray materials and supplies in general’

’Medicines have always been very cheap here and now these medicines are expensive. Many medicines, mainly antibiotics, come from capitalist markets, as do raw materials to manufacture the medicines, for which you need hard currency. Obviously, this effects the whole population because it will prove impossible to keep producing whole lines of antibiotics.’

Asked about the purpose of the US blockade, Dr Carbonell said: ‘What can a three-year-old or a small baby doe about our system being socialist or capitalist? The child is the ultimate victim of the blockade. And when someone has a heart attack, you don’t care if they are socialist, capitalist or counter-revolutionary. They are human beings.’

Donations to the fund can be made to: Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Latin America House, Kingsgate Place, London NW6 4TA.