The program grew out of Cuba’s internationalist collaboration in Venezuela, where nearly 20,000 Cuban doctors are providing health care in rural and working-class communities. So far, tens of thousands of Venezuelans have received eye operations in Cuba.

Since the program was expanded in July, more than 5,000 people from 10 Caribbean countries have had operations in Cuba to restore their sight, the Cuban embassy in Guyana has reported. The joint Cuban-Venezuelan plan, covering people from all Latin America and the Caribbean, offers to treat 600,000 people a year over the next 10 years.

Cuban doctors are performing some 1,500 eye operations a day. Free transportation to Cuba is provided along with food and lodging for the patients. The simple operation takes about 10 minutes.

More than 2,000 Guyanese so far have received eye treatment in Cuba. “If people had to go to a private doctor for the same treatment, it could cost up to US$2,000 each,” the Guyanese health minister told the Jamaican Observer.

More than 3,000 patients from Belize have received eye surgery. “Because of financial constraints or the inaccessibility to the services, many individuals suffer from conditions that are very easy to treat,” said Eugenio Martínez, Cuba’s ambassador to Belize, in an interview in the September 15 issue of the Belizean newspaper San Pedro Sun.

David Scott, a 75-year-old Jamaican farmer, had been blind from cataracts for two years before his sight was restored in Cuba in September. Surgery at a local hospital had repeatedly been postponed. “When you can’t see it makes you miserable and it is like you’re sick and a part off your life is gone,” Scott told the Jamaica Observer. “When them take off the bandage off me eye me see the wall and the doctors. Oh man, you can’t imagine how it feel.”

Diann Edwards, a farm worker in Jamaica who was forced to quit a job because of a cataract, said she could not have afforded the surgery. One of the first 50 Jamaicans to receive the operation in Cuba, she said, “We were feted and given world class medical care.”

This initiative by the Cuban government takes place as many medical technicians are leaving semicolonial countries for the imperialist centers. A regional health official noted that the Caribbean loses some 300 nurses annually to the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Jamaica has lost 41 percent of its doctors and Haiti 35 percent, according to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Some 25,000 Cuban doctors are currently providing medical services in 66 countries, Reuters reports. The Cuban government is also training medical students from around the semicolonial world to help meet the health-care needs in their countries.  
 
 
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