DOES AFRICA NEED CUBA?

The continent has a duty to promote Cuba’s friendly visibility among African peoples, writes Okello Oculi

In 1996 Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid government adopted a policy of ensuring that his government would serve the vast majority of African citizens who had been denied medical care by decades of racist governance by European immigrants. Accordingly, Mandela chose to focus on providing ‘’Primary Health Care’’ as opposed to ‘Secondary Curative Health Care’.

In Nigeria this policy was initiated by Professor Beko Ransome-Kuti during General Ibrahim Babangida’s administration despite opposition by the leadership of the Nigerian Medical Association. Curative care is popular with companies that sell medical drugs; medical equipment to be housed in medical wards and theatres; employing medical doctors located in urban areas and serving patients with high-income.

Future South African doctors and nurses trained to provide ‘’Primary Health Care’’ had to go to Cuba whose leaders remained highly indebted to poor rural communities from whom they recruited fighters for their guerrilla war against the American-backed government of Batista. Accordingly, the ‘’Nelson Mandela-Fidel Castro medical collaboration’’ programme was launched.

The programme sent 800 South African students annually to study medicine in Cuba. By 2017 a total of 4000 medical graduates had returned to South Africa. As a liberation movement which had anchored its strength in promising a better life for oppressed and neglected Black people, the African National Congress had chosen an appropriate strategy for building a cadres for supplying a democratic medical health care for this constituency.

Buhle Maud Donda has reported that: ‘’South African medical students returning from five years of training in Cuba were ‘’seen as foreign and incompetent’’ by the Boer-controlled medical establishment. The University of KwaZulu Natal Medical School provides ‘’one to three years of extended medical school training when they return’’. A total of eight years of medical school attendance delayed access to needy populations, while seducing them with curative urban-based care, and Specialisation fields, notably surgery, which yield lucrative income.

In the early years of independence, most British-trained Nigerian/Ugandan/Ghanaian/ Kenyan officials treated with loud contempt the quality of degrees awarded by American, Indian and Soviet Union universities. When the Soviet Union was the first to put Satellite SPUTNIK into space and the astronaut Yuri Gagarin into space, they swallowed their foolishness.

South Africa’s medical gatekeepers also subject Cuban graduates to “education with humiliation’’ and high rates of failures; thereby, brutally undermining the goal of the ANC government to take medical care to the masses of the people. It is puzzling that the ANC lacks the vigilance against predictable sabotage. Cuba owes Africa resilient broadcast of Primary Health Care scheme; and teaching African peoples the virtue of vigilance.

Fidel Castro boasted, justifiably that his bold policy of sending Cuban troops to defeat and drive back South African troops from Angola ensured the collapse of the myth of South Africa’s military superiority in Africa. Bitterness towards Cuba runs deep among white South Africans.

Cuba has trained thousands of medical doctors and nurses for export to support medical needs in countries in Asia, South America and several African countries despite diplomatic opposition from Euro-American corporations who find that Cuba’s gospel of promoting ‘’Primary Health Care’’ denies them markets in poor countries with predominantly rural populations. It prevents piling debts for importing medical drugs and expensive medical technology.

America’s use of its global financial power to intimidate rich European and oil-rich Arab Gulf states from trading with, and investing in, Cuba forced them to turn to intensive research to produce what they could not import.

Despite Cuba’s invention of medicines from herbal materials, they are denied markets. In 2021, its invention of a vaccine that is 92 per cent effective against COVID-19, more expensive and less effective American vaccines are imposed on African governments. The African Union must give Cuba publicised diplomatic support against this economic terrorism; and prevent a COVID-19 debt burden. A Cuban-African Research collaboration is imperative.

America’s high-cost of medical care would lose billions of Dollars if ‘’Medical Tourism’’ to Cuba is allowed to American people. Cuba eliminated MALARIA through disciplined community cleaning the environment; NOT with money for buying millions of anti-malaria drugs. African medical tourists would gain cheaper high quality services.

Japan, China and Cuba have built national strength on free universal elementary education; and high quality university research and publications. Africa has over 80 million unemployed youths who experience violence as income and religious barbarism. Paul Kagame has condemned African leaders who travel to Paris to be told about problems they see in their own countries.

Following his winning power in 1959, Fidel Castro shipped military weapons to support Algeria’s liberation war; and trained Tunisian fighters. Somalia, Ethiopia, Angola, South Africa, Tanzania, and Namibia also received Cuban military support. They have obligation to promote Cuba’s friendly visibility among African peoples. And combat hostile Euro-American propaganda.