Cuba has lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America

In 2003, Cuba attained a rate of 6.3 infant deaths per 1,000 live births as an international measure of health and, in particular, of maternal-infant care. This makes Cuba the Latin American country with the lowest infant mortality rate.

According to the State of the World’s Children published by Unicef, the United States registers 7.0 (a figure which masks the increasing disparity between the death rates for white infants on the one hand and black and hispanic infants on the other). Cuba’s figures are broadly uniform across the country, with the poorest region, rural Guantanamo, having a figure of 8.6, with other provinces ranging from 4.2 to 6.0.

Many developing countries have figures as high as 60 deaths per 1,000 live births; the least developed have rates of 100.

Cuba’s impressive figure reflects the priority given to health care within the country, its universal accessibility and the training and commitment of its health professionals.

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 177 February/March 2004

Miami Five appeal to be held in mafia territory

The Miami 5, five Cubans given sentences ranging from 15 years to life imprisonment on trumped-up spying charges in the United States, will have their appeal heard from 10 March onwards. But the appeal will be held in Miami where the original trial took place in an atmosphere of anti-Cuban hysteria and political pressure. The fact that a fair hearing for the Cubans was impossible in such a hostile environment forms one of the 24 grounds for their appeal.

Among other grounds for appeal is the argument that the activities of the Miami 5 were aimed at preventing acts of violence, planned by the Miami mafia against Cuba, and that such acts could have had negative consequences for the US. In the original trial, the judge had refused to allow evidence showing the Cubans had acted out of ‘necessity’. The defence will also argue that the prosecution evidence was inadequate, that they were not allowed to present a proper defence, and that the defendants were mistreated by being held in solitary confinement for 17 months before their trial and having their documents confiscated.

Meanwhile, the torture and mistreatment continue. Since their original trial, the Cuban political prisoners have been held in separate prisons spread across the US and are unable to contact each other. During the war on Iraq, they were kept in solitary confinement. The US administration has denied their families visas to travel to the US or moved the prisoners at short notice to prevent relatives from visiting them.

If this appeal fails, the Miami 5 could ask for an ‘en banc’ hearing in front of all the 14 to 16 11th Circuit judges. After that, their only further course of action is an appeal to the Supreme Court, a body loaded with right-wing supporters of George Bush.

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 177 February/March 2004

Cuban doctors bring hope to Venezuela’s barrios

In recent months, Cuba has strengthened agreements made with the Venezuelan government, aimed at improving the living conditions of the Venezuelan working class through social projects ranging from free sports training to a massive literacy campaign. One of the most impressive contributions has been in health care, which the Chavez government aims to revolutionise by providing virtually free medical care via local clinics, with the help of thousands of Cuban specialists. Cubans are involved in similar campaigns from Honduras to Argentina; perhaps it is this solidarity that US Secretary of State Colin Powell was referring to in January when he hypocritically attacked Cuba for so-called attempts to ‘destabilise parts of the region’ and ‘create discontent’. JUANJO RIVAS reports on the Cuban internationalist mission in Venezuela.

In 1999 the Chavez government approved one of the world’s most progressive constitutions that challenges the problems of a country exhausted by poverty, foreign intervention, illiteracy, infant mortality and corruption. Fine words on paper have been backed by concrete programmes, including:

• the nationalisation of basic resources;
• $1.5 million targeted on tackling illiteracy;
• the creation of cooperatives of small producers;
• widespread construction of affordable housing;
• a new subway and railway systems in seven cities;
• a modern medical centre for treatment of congenital heart diseases.

The new plan, called Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighbourhood), is intended to reach deprived areas where the reactionary Venezuelan Medical Federation (VMF) refuses to serve. Many VMF members used to bribe the authorities to avoid serving in rural areas – as they are obliged to do after graduating from the medical school – gravitating instead towards lucrative specialities like plastic surgery. Barrio Adentro was launched in spring 2003 in the Libertador municipality of Caracas, with the involvement of dozens of Cuban internationalists. By June there were 1,000 working in and around Caracas and by the end of 2003 the number operating in poor working class areas had doubled. This successful initiative will mean thousands of Cuban doctors offering a free health service from Carabobo to the mountainous northwest of Venezuela.

The vast majority of the Cuban doctors volunteering in Venezuela have served on at least one previous internationalist mission in the Caribbean, Africa or Latin America. They work in small clinics in the morning and, as part of a development of the the programme called Bloque Adentro (Inside the Block), make house-to-house visits in the afternoon to get first-hand experience of living conditions and health problems in a specific area, practising preventive medicine. They are offered accommodation and the community knows how to contact them at any time, including nights and weekends, free of charge.

The Venezuelan bourgeoisie is using big business dailies like El Universal, together with right-wing private TV stations, to wage a virulent campaign against the programme. The VMF has denounced Barrio Adentro, asking the courts to ban the foreign doctors from practising and arguing that rather than medical experts these are ‘Castro’s agents’ who aim to indoctrinate the poor, ‘proselytising’ to them with communist propaganda. They also claim that the Cubans are taking the jobs of about 8,000 national doctors who are jobless or underemployed. However, Health Minister Maria Urbaneja insists the Cubans were invited because the government couldn’t find enough Venezuelans willing to work in working-class neighbourhoods. The fact is that a visit to a private clinic costs up to $31, beyond the reach of the mass of the people whose earnings are close to the minimum wage of $125 per month.

The vast majority of the people are satisfied with the humanity, sensitivity and professionalism of the Cubans. Indeed, some middle-class people have switched to take advantage of the free clinics, while still attacking their government for providing them! This represents a split with the most entrenched and reactionary oligarchy that fears a boost of support for Chavez and has pressurised hospitals to turn away patients referred by the Cuban doctors. Last September, this led to the death of a child.

The Cuban doctors, who are mostly women, have faced anonymous death threats in response to their courageous and comradely commitment to save and improve the lives of their fellow Latin Americans. The success of the programme could bring paramilitary repression from privileged and deeply reactionary sectors, as happened to Cuban teachers and doctors volunteering in Nicaragua and Angola in the 1980s. But their revolutionary consciousness makes this a risk they are willing to face in this battle for life where the medicines are their only munitions.

Washington fears this international solidarity which continues to boost support for Cuba throughout Latin America and increase working-class support for the Bolivarian Revolution. To undermine this process they have tried without success to fund and train dissident mercenaries in Cuba, call for support for the criminal blockade (see previous issues) and expelled under false allegations 19 diplomats in the last 13 months from the Cuban Interest Section in Washington and the Mission to the United Nations.

The internal opposition in Venezuela is backed by the exiled oligarchy that has already attempted two coups against the government and is allied with the terrorist Cuban-American mafia of Miami. They are joined by the billionaire former president of Bolivia, overthrown by a popular uprising last October. These elements are developing a common agenda that fits with US imperialist plans for the subcontinent.

However, there are important lessons to be learned from the Cuba-Venezuela agreements:

• It is possible and necessary for underdeveloped countries to establish non-profit-based trade, for the exchange of goods, human capital and cooperative experiences that have a direct positive impact on the living standards of the dispossessed.
• Such exchanges will sharpen the contradictions between those who clamour for more profound and revolutionary changes and the alliance of the privileged and imperialists, leading to an open struggle between revolution and reaction.
• Cuba and Venezuela lead this process in Latin America through the creation of networks of resistance and solidarity, like the Bolivarian Congress of the Peoples (Caracas, November 2003) attended by 400 delegates from Latin American social movements, or the summit against the Free Trade Area of Americas (Havana, 26-29 January 2004). This strategy challenges debt and foreign aggression and encourages indigenous rights, sovereignty against imperialism, education, health care, instruments for participative democracy and so on. If this is the ‘discontent’ and ‘destabilisation in parts of the region’ that Colin Powell talked about, we welcome it.

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 177 February/March 2004