BY GREG ROSENBERG
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Nearly 100 Cuban doctors arrived in South Africa February 27 to serve for a three-year stint in some of the country's worst-off rural areas that lack physicians. They are the first of potentially hundreds of Cuban doctors who have volunteered to go to South Africa as part of an agreement between the African National Congress-led government and Havana.
Cuban deputy health minister Jorge Antelo Pérez, who had served as a volunteer with the Cuban forces in Angola in the 1970s, was among the group. "We like South Africans and we have close relations with many of them," said Pérez.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans served on internationalist missions in Angola between the mid-1970s and late 1980s. Cuban volunteer troops - fighting alongside the Angolan army and Namibian volunteers - helped defeat successive invasions of that country by South Africa's apartheid regime, which was determined to block the Angolan people from realizing their independence from Portugal.
The apartheid army was dealt a decisive military defeat at Cuito Cuanavale in early 1988 and was driven out of Angola. This victory paved the way for the independence of Namibia. By puncturing once and for all the myth of the white supremacists' invincibility, the outcome at Cuito Cuanavale gave another impulse to the battle against apartheid inside South Africa. In February 1990, the regime of F.W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC. That same month, Nelson Mandela walked out triumphantly from Victor Verster prison in Cape Town, free for the first time in 27 years. Four years later, the ANC won a big majority in the first-ever nonracial nationwide elections.
"There are many people here who have no medicine. I have come to give all I have," Cuban surgeon García Sarria, 53, told the Associated Press.
South African health minister Nkosana Zuma, who was among those at the Johannesburg airport to welcome the doctors, said their arrival was an extension of the aid given to the ANC by revolutionary Cuba. She also criticized London and other governments for luring away South African doctors with salary offers the ANC-led government cannot match.
"We are not pleased with what Britain is doing here and we are having discussions with them," Zuma said. "Obviously they do not feel compassionate towards us if they are willing to take the few doctors we have, having trained them at great expense, and leave our people without doctors." In earlier statements Zuma had announced that the Cubans will receive the same pay as South African government doctors and will be sent to rural areas, about 600 of which are considered urgently in need of them. There are only 22,000 doctors for a population of 43 million people. The majority of these physicians are in urban areas, but most South African Blacks live in rural regions.
"We are the beggars and not the Cubans," Zuma said. "They did mention it... that it is only because they were part of the struggle [against apartheid] in South Africa that they wanted to be part of the transformation."
There are 2,000 unfilled government medical posts in South Africa. Surveys show that up to half the English-speaking medical graduates leave the country shortly after they get out of school for jobs with more lucrative pay abroad.
During the February 27 welcoming ceremony, Zuma reiterated statements by South African president Nelson Mandela that his government would not allow Washington to dictate who its friends should be. "I invited Fidel Castro. He was supposed to come in August last year, but he asked for a postponement," Mandela said in a television interview February 11, marking the sixth anniversary of his release from prison. "I am determined to have him in this country." Mandela also stated he will invite Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to South Africa.
"Those are our friends who were with us when we were all alone.... I'm not going to take advice as to who my friends should be... The enemies of the West are not my enemies and I'm not prepared to be dictated to at all by anybody."
The big-business press in South Africa and capitalist politicians reacted with discomfort and continued to encourage Mandela to distance himself and the South African government from Cuba.
"It's sad to say it, but President Mandela has no feel for foreign policy," said a February 13 editorial in the Johannesburg Citizen, a daily historically aligned with de Klerk's National Party. "Mandela makes a great mistake in confusing the interests of the African National Congress and the interests of South Africa.... Castro is regarded as a dictator and his country has a bad record of human rights violations.... Why should South Africa anger the United States, in particular, by putting out the red carpet before them?"
"With this invitation," complained National Party foreign affairs spokesperson Boy Geldenhuys, "investor confidence in South Africa is being sabotaged." He provided no evidence for his claim, however.
The U.S. embassy initially refused comment. The State Department followed up by stating that "our positions on Libya and Cuba are well known....We hope that South Africa will take the opportunity to press [U.S.] concerns during any exchanges it may have with Libya or Cuba."
Mandela responded to the press, "Both our enemies here and our friends in the West said to me, `if you want to be acceptable to the world get rid of Cuba, get rid of Muammar Qaddafi." But, he added, "We will never renounce our friends, no matter how unpopular they may be with you."
During a recent visit to Washington, Tokyo Sexwale, premier of South Africa's Gauteng province, was telephoned by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida and chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa. Ros-Lehtinen, a virulent opponent of the Cuban revolution, urged Sexwale to cancel a planned trip to Cuba. Sexwale declined.