One such example is an article in the November 14 Forbes, a business magazine. In it Susan Kitchens tries to discredit Cuba’s international medical program. She describes Cuba’s volunteer doctors in 18 African countries and other nations as “Castro’s medical mercenaries.” That’s the article’s headline.

At the center of Kitchens’s concern are the 20,000 Cuban doctors and other medical personnel volunteering in Venezuela today, largely in working-class districts and rural areas with little or no access to health care in the past. The Forbes writer claims that the increasing numbers of Cuban doctors force Venezuelan physicians to lose jobs to unqualified Cubans. “Imported doctors are resented in anti-Chávez quarters for being central to a growing Cubanization of the country under its radical leader,” Kitchens adds, referring to Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

What Kitchens doesn’t say is that few Venezuelan doctors volunteered to work in the government-sponsored clinics operated by Cuban physicians. Their presence may be resented in “anti-Chávez quarters,” including among Venezuelan doctors used to a bourgeois lifestyle through for-profit medicine. But the vast majority of working people, and many in the middle classes, have welcomed and defended the Cuban doctors, and hold in high esteem what Kitchens terms as the “clinics for the dirt poor.” This is what Militant reporters have found in recent trips throughout Venezuela.

“Why don’t they come up here into the hills?” Marta Díaz, a Cuban doctor in Venezuela for two years, told Associated Press in July, responding to telltales such as those promoted by Kitchens.

Among numerous false claims, Kitchens says health care in Cuba has deteriorated due to “poorly equipped hospitals,” lack of resources, and a “shortage of doctors,” as more doctors are being “exiled” abroad.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Cuba lost most of its trade in favorable terms, access to medicines was drastically limited. Washington’s four-decade-long economic war against the Cuban Revolution has also limited imports of needed drugs and medical equipment from other countries.

The Cuban government, however, has continued to improve the country’s medical system. More than 50 hospitals have been renovated and expanded throughout Cuba as of July of this year. Improvements include repairing and reequipping the country’s polyclinics and rehabilitation wards with more advanced medical technology.

There is roughly one doctor for every 170 Cubans today. In comparison, the United States has one doctor per 188 residents, according to the World Health Organization. The most recent figures show that infant mortality in Cuba is 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births. It is 7 in the United States. With nearly one out of six people in the United States without health insurance, millions don’t seek medical attention when they are sick because they can’t afford it.

Cuba doesn’t just send doctors to assist other countries. It is helping semicolonial nations, like Equatorial Guinea in central Africa, develop their own health-care system—a fact the Forbes article omits.

In his speech to the first graduating class of 1,600 students from the Latin American School of Medicine, Cuban president Fidel Castro said the aim of the school is to train students from semicolonial countries in order to end the need one day for Cuban medical workers to serve worldwide. Cuba is now training some 12,000 medical students from 83 countries, including from the United States, to return prepared to serve as doctors in working-class neighborhoods and remote rural areas in their countries.

The idea that doctors would volunteer to go to countries lacking medical personnel, facilities, or often a health-care system, is beyond Kitchens’s comprehension. It’s a “negation of professional status,” she retorts, concluding that these missions must be a profit-making maneuver by Havana.

If sending doctors by the thousands to work where there is a dire need for them is so profitable and has such propaganda value, why hasn’t any capitalist government discovered this scheme yet?

It’s because such missions defy for-profit medicine. The reality is the U.S. rulers fear the example—dangerous for the ruling capitalists—of selfless internationalism that Cuba sets for working people the world over and use scribblers like Kitchens to discredit that example.
 
 
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