21548: Esser: Cuba a major benefactor to strife-torn Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The State [South Carolina]
http://www.thestate.com

April 25, 2004

Cuba a major benefactor to strife-torn Haiti
By WILLIAM STEIF

Special to The State

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti —Killings and chaos have been the main news out
of this poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere in recent months.

But something positive is happening. The problem is its source —
Cuba, which turns off many folks automatically.

What’s positive is aid from Fidel Castro’s nation, whose eastern tip
is only 48 miles across the water from northwest Haiti.

Cuba isn’t coughing up any money, says Cuban ambassador to Haiti
Rolando A. Gomez Gonzales. But, he adds, “There are 579 Cuban health
specialists in Haiti now, most of them doctors.”

“We can’t offer financial assistance because we’re also a blocked
country” — a reference to the U.S. embargo on Cuba — “but we can give
our human resources.”

Haiti is in a Maryland-sized country of 8.5 million people with fewer
than 2,000 physicians total, concentrated mainly in its capital.

In addition, says Gomez, “Our collaboration supports veterinary
services. Cuba is training 628 Haitian doctors in Haiti and Cuba. We
have a program to combat illiteracy here. We’ve revived the abandoned
Haitian sugar industry, and we’re aiding the fishing industry by
stocking 7 million fish and hope to reach 15 million a year.”

Gomez says 705 Cubans are working in Haiti. “The cooperation isn’t
motivated by ideology or politics. We’re helping the Haitian people
who’ve suffered so much in the last 200 years.”

COOPERATING AGAINST POVERTY

Cuba had no diplomatic relations with Haiti after Castro took over at
the start of 1959.

“There were hardly any contacts” during Haiti’s Duvalier
dictatorships, Gomez says, even though many people in eastern Cuba
are descended from Haitians who crossed the water.

The Duvaliers were overthrown in early 1986, and relations between
Cuba and Haiti resumed in 1996, at the end of Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first term.

“Today, it’s different,” says Gomez. “After 1996, both countries
began intergovernmental cooperation ... to combat the extreme poverty
here.”

Gomez adds: “We’re working in 95 percent of Haiti’s 133
municipalities. We consider our cooperation exemplary. It’s
disinterested, unconditional support.”

Haitian public health services “have no specialists in the main
cities — no surgery, no anesthesia, no obstetrics,” Gomez says

That may be one reason Haiti’s infant mortality rate — deaths in the
first year of life — is about 93 per 1,000 live births. Cuban and
U.S. rates: 7 per 1,000 births.

In a press conference at the United Nations in New York, Cuba’s
permanent representative, Orlando Requeijo Gual, said Cuban doctors
provide health care for 75 percent of Haitians.

He says Cuban medical efforts saved nearly 86,000 Haitian lives in
the last five years. In early March, for example, a Cuban medical
team set up a canvas hospital next to Port-au-Prince’s University
Hospital and, in five days, helped 406 patients, 33 with gunshot
wounds, the U.N. representative says. This came after a Feb. 11 Cuban
shipment of 12.2 tons of medicines.

Gomez says Haiti pays the salaries and transportation costs of the
experts it sends to Haiti. It also provides food and lodging, and
$100 a month per person as “spending money.”

Cuban professors are on Haitian faculties and Haitians are on
scholarships at Cuba’s Santiago de Cuba university. “We have a
triangular program to fight AIDS with France and other programs with
the Pan American Health Organization and UNAID,” says Gomez.

U.S. AID DOES NOT GO TO GOVERNMENT

Cubans arriving in Haiti learn Creole, the Haitian language, in about
three to four months, Gomez adds.

Gomez says Cuba spends $520,000 a year to supply its experts to
Haiti, a tiny sum compared to what U.S. State Department Lou Fintor
says the United States spends.

“The U.S. is the largest donor since Aristide was restored to power
(in 1994), making more than $850 million in donor funds available to
Haiti in fiscal years 1995 to 2003,” Fintor said, speaking by phone
from Washington. “All U.S. grants in 2003 totaled more than $70
million to promote health care, nutrition, education, sustainable
agriculture, micro-enterprise and democracy programs.”

Haitian Embassy spokesman John Kozyn, speaking by phone from
Washington, says “most of that (U.S.) money has been funneled through
NGOs and PVOs” — non-government organizations and private voluntary
organizations.

Kozyn says the money “does not go to the government,” it mostly goes
through outfits like Catholic Relief Services or Lutheran and Baptist
projects.

Aristide’s recent ouster isn’t likely to affect Cuban aid to Haiti,
says Requeijo Gual.

• Cuban workers have been instrumental in reconstruction of a big
sugar mill at Darbonne.

• 20 Cuban veterinarians and technicians are putting together a
sanitary control program while training Haitian staff.

• 10 Cuban technicians are helping with a national aquaculture program.

• Eleven Cuban agricultural specialists are working as part of the
Food and Agriculture Organization’s food security program.

• Cuba also is cooperating in a road-building program.

Cubans also are pushing literacy in Haiti, where 49 percent of the
citizens are illiterate, according to Cuba’s Fernando Fernandez
Rodriguez.

Normally a university teacher at Holguin, Cuba, Fernandez has been in
Haiti since October 2002, leading 20 other Cubans “training Haitians
who run the national literacy program.”

The Haitians conduct radio classes “at homes, workplaces,
schoolrooms,” says Fernandez.

“We finished a term last July, taught literacy to 109,000 people,” he
said. “This is very significant because all other literacy programs
here have failed. Now, we’re giving literacy to a quarter-million
people who must learn to read and write in Creole.”

William Steif, a retired journalist, lives in Blythewood.
.