Cuba sends 91 more doctors to fight Ebola

Every few years Dr Leonardo Fernandez flies to a nation shaken by natural disaster, political turmoil or disease, leaving his hospital in eastern Cuba for countries that have included Pakistan, Nicaragua and East Timor.
Yesterday, the intensive care specialist was headed to the epicenter of the Ebola epidemic along with 90 other Cuban medical workers as part of a half-century-old strategy that puts doctors on the front lines of the country's foreign policy.
The 91 nurses and doctors going to Guinea and Liberia join 165 already in Sierra Leone making this island of 11 million people one of the largest global contributors of medical workers to the fight against Ebola.

The commitment has drawn rare praise from the US and focused worldwide attention on Cuba's unique program of medical diplomacy, which deploys armies of doctors to win friends abroad and earn more than USD 6 billion a year in desperately needed foreign exchange.
Cuba has more than 50,000 medical workers in more than 60 countries, many in nations like Brazil that pay hundreds of millions a year for their services.
Others are on humanitarian missions that generate good will abroad and bolster Cuba's efforts to portray its medical system as one of the most important successes of a socialist economy wracked by slow growth, shortages and chronic underinvestment.

"Cuba is a lightweight boxer which boxes in the superheavyweight classes precisely because of its foreign policy and its international cooperation," said John Kirk, chair of Latin American studies at Canada's Dalhouse University and an expert on Cuban medical missions.

"This is part of the Cuban political DNA ... This is altruism as well as burnishing its international credentials." Despite a recent set of pay raises, most Cuban doctors' salaries don't top USD 75 a month, less than many workers who work in tourism or other sectors that bring in money from abroad.
The foreign missions almost uniformly offer the chance to earn extra pay, in many cases enough to buy a bigger home or new car.

Critics of Cuba's communist government have accused it in the past of exploiting the doctors by giving them only a meager portion of the money paid for their services and keeping the lion's share for the national treasury.