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25,000 Cuban doctors on
internationalist missions
• Valuable human capital for serving
the world • Fidel gives closing remarks at 9th
International Seminar on Primary Healthcare
BY SILVIA BARTHELEMY—Granma daily staff writer—
CUBA possesses valuable human
capital available for serving the world; that is our
greatest wealth, and we have nothing to exhibit
other than that fortune and our willingness and
desire to cooperate with the neediest people,
affirmed President Fidel Castro Ruz in closing
remarks at the 9th International Seminar on Primary
Healthcare.
Cuba has more than 70,000
doctors, including 60,000 specialists and about
25,000 who are on internationalist missions.
The Cuban president commented on
some of the realities of today’s world with the
1,000-plus delegates who attended the event.
“Humanity is irresponsibly
heading toward a dead end, and many of you, thanks
to your experiences in internationalist missions,
have been able to confirm that,” he said. “You have
witnessed the dire poverty, calamities, inequalities
and exclusion suffered by many nations throughout
the Earth.”
Fidel noted that in face of these
realities, the Cuban people are waging a Battle of
Ideas, entrenching themselves in intelligence,
knowledge, humane ideas and solidarity, and are
engaged in an energy revolution.
He also highlighted the double
standards applied by the White House and its lackeys
in the Human Rights Commission. There, it makes
accusations against other countries but fails to say
a single word regarding its own irregularities in
the Hurricane Katrina disaster, or the torture and
abuse committed by its soldiers in its prisons in
Iraq, Afghanistan, the naval base it illegally
maintains in Guantánamo, and the secret detention
centers in “sophisticated” Europe.
The U.S. government is more
demoralized every day, and will increasingly
encounter greater resistance because people know
very well what the realities in that country are,
where 43 million people (20% of its population) lack
healthcare, and poverty and exclusion are on the
rise.
He mentioned the medical
cooperation provided by our country’s health
professionals in Latin America, Africa and Asia for
preventive care, healing and saving lives under any
circumstance. He also referred to the educational
work being carried out by our internationalists, who
are training thousands of young people both here in
Cuba and in some of those countries.
“We train them with the most
modern educational technology, with the ethics
necessary for them to have as the precept of their
future duty to human beings, and for them to have as
their essential purpose the spreading of health,”
Fidel emphasized.
During the event’s final session,
participants included José Ramón Machado Ventura,
José Ramón Balaguer Cabrera, Pedro Ross Leal and
Concepción Campa, all members of the Political
Bureau, as well as representatives of international
organizations in the health field. |
