Sujeet
The Boston Globe
As Cuba loans doctors abroad, some patients object at home
By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Globe Staff | August 25, 2005
HAVANA -- Free universal healthcare has long been the crowning achievement of this socialist state, but the system is now under fire from Cubans who complain that quality and access are suffering as they lose tens of thousands of medical workers to Venezuela in exchange for cheap oil, which this impoverished country desperately needs.
The close friendship between Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has netted Venezuela a loan of 20,000 Cuban health workers -- including 14,000 doctors, according to the Venezuelan government -- who work in poor barrios and rural outposts for stipends seven times higher on average than their salaries at home. Castro has vowed to send Chavez as many as 10,000 additional medical workers by year's end.
In return for farming out more than one-fifth of its doctors to the petroleum-rich state, Cuba is permitted to import 90,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela under preferential terms. The arrangement gives Cuba's struggling economy, crippled by the US embargo in place since 1963, the biggest boost since the country lost Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s.
The Cuban doctors program is wildly popular among Venezuela's poor. But Cubans have begun to object that the exodus of their healthcare workers is taking a toll on medical care for Cubans. Most people interviewed would speak only on condition that they not be identified or asked that just their first names be used, for fear of reprisals.
A 45-year-old nurse in Camagüey province said she has worked without a doctor in her primary-care clinic for more than two years since the physician was transferred to another clinic to replace a doctor sent to Venezuela.
''My patients complain every day. They want me to act as a doctor, but I can't," she said helplessly. ''The level of attention isn't the same as before. It's not fair . . . to take from us to give to our neighbors. People are now saying, 'I've got to get a ticket to Venezuela to get healthcare!' "
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