Human Rights Foreign Policy: Cuba and the Right to Health

This is just a qoute from the back cover (a blurb) of the book: John M. Kirk and H. Michael Erisman, Cuban Medical Internationalism (2009: New York, Palgrave MacMillan), to remind me to read this book later when I have more time. I was reminded about Widi's Cuban doctor friend whom she met in Indonesia while on a mission to assist victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Before Widi told me about her doctor friend, I haven't heard about Cuban medical internationalism.

"While public health is important for revolutionary Cuba, providing medical service to the developing world is also a priority: some 40,000 medical staff are engaged abroad; the largest medical school in the world (ELAM) has an enrollment of over 8,000 students from the Third World; and since 2004, over 1.5 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean have had their eyesight restored at no cost to them. How has this small nation of 11.3 million people managed this? And what are its motives? This book, the result of four years of research in Cuba, provides an updated analysis of this extraordinary record."

"...In sum, Cuba is credited with saving more lives in the developing world than all the G-8 countries together. ..."

And a short quote from the concluding Chapter:

"[Cuba's] multifaceted contribution undoubtedly reaches more people than the work of all of the G-8 countries together, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Nobel Peace Prize recepient Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). Each one of these Cuban initiatives puts the industrialized world to shame and, sadly, the extraordinary value of the Cuban contribution to humanity has been badly ignred by Western media. ..." (p. 170)