Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution

Abstract

Vijay Prashad has recently written about a movement to nominate a group of Cuban doctors for a Nobel Peace Prize for their work in battling COVID-19, Ebola and other diseases on the African continent, and treating catastrophic injuries incurred from hurricanes and landslides in Central and Latin America (People’s Dispatch, August 25, 2020). Predictably, the Trump administration, along with Human Rights Watch and Trump’s small group of Latin American allies, has been pressuring the World Health Organization and the Norwegian Nobel Institute to block these front-line doctors from receiving such an honor simply, it seems, because they are representatives of the Cuban government. The doctors are members of the Henry Reeve Brigade. This group is regularly dispatched to catastrophic hotspots by the Cuban government. The group is named after a New Yorker, Henry Reeve, who died fighting for Cuba in its First War of Independence from Spain from 1895–98. Monthly Review Press has recently released a timely book, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, by Don Fitz. Fitz tells an intriguing and valiant story of a Cuban health care system that has grown largely in isolation and from humble beginnings, largely due to a brutal financial and cultural embargo imposed by the US government since 1959.