Posted on 08/03/2006 1:05:49 PM PDT by oldleft
HAVANA, Aug 3 (Reuters) - For hundreds of thousands of poor people from the Andes to the Himalayas, the legacy of Cuba's ailing communist leader Fidel Castro will be not revolutionary war but eyesight.
For decades, the now ailing Castro, who temporarily handed over power to his brother Raul on Monday, prescribed armed revolution to cure the Third World's ills. But more recently he has preferred to export doctors to treat poor people in the undeveloped world.
The programs have expanded rapidly thanks to financial support from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, leader of the world's eighth-largest oil producer and Castro's main ally.
Medical diplomacy is helping Cuba gain friends in its ideological battle with Washington. But at home, Cubans have mixed feelings about so many of their doctors going abroad. It has affected the free health-care system that once boasted a family doctor on every block.
(Excerpt) Read more at alertnet.org ...
And Mussolini made sure the trains ran on time.
If one were to write such a story for rooters, though, it would be about "Why isn't the US doing MORE?"
I read a report somewhere recently that 1500 of 3000 of his exported "doctors" have DEFECTED since getting out of his hell hole.
Get ready for a lot of this.
The sumbitch ain't dead yeat but the rush is on to re-write his legacy into St. Fidel.
IIRC: Didn't some of the Cuban doctors in Venezuela and Bolivia run away?
Why do the Left constantly praise the worst human rights violators in the world as being humanitarians?
"Every time you go to a clinic now there is a line of 30 people," one young man said. "There are no more family doctors, now there is a community doctor."
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lol, socialized medicine at its finest...
"You there. You're going to help the poor in Honduras...but all your family will be staying here."
...for the eye opener...check this site out.."therealcuba.com"
...a photo essay of life in cuba...
Doogle
Most leftists seem to understand that Hitler was evil, but they just don't seem to understand that people like Stalin, Mao and Fidel are evil as well. Somehow it is acceptable to leftists when communists kill millions of their own citizens.
When Castro offered to send doctors to New Orleans, we should have taken him up on the offer so that the New Orleans residents could get a gander at how good Castro's doctors really are.
the left is fine with sending people to their maker as long as they are given equal grave sizes.
rueters will not go there.....too much explaining to do
Doogle
And it would have given more Cuban doctors a chance to defect.
Of course. Cubans don't need doctors, cause they're already in his grip. The doctors are sent to some poor Latin American country in order to scrape some popular support there. Once that country falls to communism, the doctors are sent somewhere else. Socialist revolutionary diplomacy.
As for all those who have been lucky enough to escape his putrid regime, they exported themselves...
Capitalist intellectuals -– and there are not many, since most of these people have jobs -– argue that Cuba is a squalid, corrupt, poverty-ridden basket case, a land of oppression and secret police and torture chambers run by a megalomaniac who practices the most idiotic, inhuman and degrading economic system ever invented.
So here we sit in the chartroom, with our competing maps. What to think?
Well, ask yourself what it would take to give up your home, your country, your family and all your friends. Ask yourself how desperate you would have to be to sneak out in the night, and strap your family – your grandmother and infant son – to a collection of inner tubes lashed together and set out in the dark surf across 90 miles of shark-infested water in the dead of night, hoping against hope to make landfall. We can all agree, I think, that that kind of desperation could only be driven by a fairly passionate first-person opinion of such things. Surely this goes beyond what you or I would do to win a map argument at Starbucks.
So. Go up on deck, get out the telescope, and answer one simple question for me and for yourself:
Which way are the rafts headed?
--Bill Whittle, Eject! Eject! Eject!
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