Fantastic article about Cuban doctor "exports"

This article is just fantastic because not only is it important, but it successfully exercises the brain as people are forced to suspend judgment in one of the most tempting areas for being judgmental, which is Cuba and its communist system.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/story/645017.html

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Cuba reaps goodwill from doctor diplomacy

Cuba churns out doctors like no other nation in the world -- it boasted one doctor for every 159 people in 2005, according to official Cuban estimates. By comparison, in 2000, the United States had about one doctor for every 414 citizens, according to the most recent figures on the World Health Organization's website.
But the doctor-to-citizen ratio in Cuba has decreased greatly because so many have been sent on international missions, a much coveted posting for doctors who make an average of $25 a month at home.
Despite the increasing risks of defection -- since 2006 the United States has made it easier than ever for Cuban doctors to abandon their posts by offering them U.S. visas from consulates wherever they defect -- Cuba seems to be relying more than ever on its vast health industry for income.
Julie M. Feinsilver, a Latin American scholar and author of Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad, maintains that Cuba is the only country that ``has developed doctors as an export commodity.''

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In the past four months alone, Cuba has inaugurated the first of seven ophthalmology hospitals that it plans to open in Algeria, staffed only by Cubans; it opened the second of at least three centers of the same kind planned in China; and it has made a commitment to staff with Cuban doctors a hospital in Qatar, Spain's La Vanguardia newspaper reported in June.
And in July, Cuba's national magazine, Bohemia, reported on its online pages that the country earned about $350 million last year from the sale of medicines abroad, second only to nickel and surpassing more traditional exports such as tobacco, rum and sugar.
More than 31,000 Cuban health workers -- most of them doctors -- who toil in 71 countries brought in $2.3 billion last year, Feinsilver said, more than any other industry, including tourism.
Most of them are paid $150 to $375 a month, a small percentage of the cash or trade benefits the Cuban government pockets in exchange for their work, she added.

ACTIVE IN VENEZUELA
The largest Cuban medical mission is in Venezuela, where anywhere from 22,000 to 30,000 health personnel have been working since 2003 in exchange for cheap oil and other trade benefits. Their presence here is an irritant for those who see in President Hugo Chávez a clone of Fidel Castro, but a relief for Venezuelans who see the doctors as the only way to receive free healthcare right in their own barrios.

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Read the whole article, especially you young people who have been interested in case studies I present about how to balance faith and reasoning, and use more and better discernment in your positions on issues and life styles.

The author uses the typical journalistic style of profiling a person who is representative of the subject (the woman doctor who seeks to defect to the US and be a highly paid doctor in the west), bracketed by comments from each side of the "opposing views," a poor person who could not even dream of medical care if it wasn't for the Cubans, and conservative ideologues who oppose Cuba receiving any positive feelings by the populace due to their communism.

Now, I happen to think this is an excellent thing that Cuba is doing. Think it through with me.

1) For whatever cynical reasons, the Cuban government chose to invest in a service that the poor desperately need. For example, they did not decide to invest in video games. So they deserve huge merit and virtue for selecting a humanitarian investment regardless of their ideology.

2) I would think supply and demand capitalists would applaud Cuba's use of this model and be secretly gleeful that they are using capitalist principles and hope for subversion of the communism that way.

3) Oddly, by investing in people and not machinery (since a doctor is their hands and their mind, and not a machine out of a factory) Cuba is actually expanding a genuine elevation of the importance of the individual, defying the traditional Communist stance of the nameless faceless masses. Cuba is fully aware of the dignity and benefit of the individual contribution, and that is a very interesting deviation from the Soviet and early Chinese eras of devaluing the individual.

4) The only huge omission in this article is to not even mention Christianity and its huge heritage of providing for the poor, both believers and not believers. While Christians hoped to evangelize and convert they never made receiving medicine or food a condition of it (unlike capitalism where you must have money or an enabling welfare system). So I think that Cuba deserves praise and merit because other than some posters and awareness that they are Cubans, they require nothing from the people they serve. If people have a mindset change and conversion as a result of their experience, that is capitalism too. After all, those opposed to Cubans and their socialism could have used their wealth to provide alternative free medical services to the poor, and of course, they haven't.

I could go on but invite all of you to think more about this article and the very interesting humanitarian, economic and ideological model that it reports about. Very, very interesting.