Cuba’s Most Important Exports: Goodwill, Doctors and Teachers
by Stephen Lendman
Cuba prioritizes world peace, stability, cooperative relations with all nations and respect for rule of law principles.
It considers healthcare and education fundamental human rights for all its people – constitutionally guaranteed.
In America, they’re commodities, available based on the ability to pay, the world’s richest country increasingly ignoring vital needs of its majority population, especially its most disadvantaged, serving its privileged class exclusively.
Cuba has 21 medical schools, the Havana-based Latin American School of Medicine (LASM) the world’s largest with an enrollment of nearly 20,000 students from scores of countries worldwide.
They get expense-free world-class education in return for committing to provide Cuban-style medical services in home or other countries to low-income, under-served communities in need.
A holistic approach focuses on individual needs, prevention, lifestyle changes important for good health and community wellness.
A medical education in America leaves students without financial help $200,000 or more indebted. They can get world-class training in Cuba in return for abiding by its model health code – serving people, giving up private practice for profit.
Cuban trained doctors serve low income communities in scores of countries worldwide, including in remote areas. So do its educators, trained to focus on teaching and learning – polar opposite of US public schools teaching to the test.
Cuba is a model social society. Spending a small fraction of the cost of healthcare in America, it provides better services overall, everyone treated equally, no one left out, world-class care available.
Cuban healthcare meets WHO standards, including:
- effectiveness;
- high “quantitative health indicators like infant mortality, nutritional status, and life expectancy;” and
- social impact with regard “not only (to) social justice and the mobilization of community resources but the process through which people gain greater control over the social, political, economic, and environmental factors that affect their health.”
Cuba is unique. Many hundreds of thousands of its doctors and other medical staff have served low-income, usually impoverished communities, in three-fourths of the world’s countries since exporting healthcare began in 1961 – including many thousands now in scores of countries, a policy initiative unimaginable from America.
One of the hemisphere’s poorest nations shames its richest – in how it treats its own people and helps millions worldwide.
Cuba wages goodwill, world-class healthcare and education, its most important exports and homeland services.
America wages state terror, endless wars of aggression, mass slaughter and destruction, disdain for democratic values and immiseration on an unprecedented scale.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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