Cubans invade Venezuela!

international | miscellaneous | news report Saturday July 05, 2003 10:55 by James McKenna jimmymac61 at hotmail dot com

doctors and literacy experts lead the invaion

Poor communities living in shacks on hillsides in Carracas have new friends. I70 Cuban doctors are now living in their homes, running clinics and providing essential healthcare. Cuban doctors are respected worldwide for their work in both left and right wing countries, working in areas where local doctors will not.

In Venezuela the upper classes are particularly spoiled and arrogant. "Professional" doctors want large salaries and will not even go into the poorer areas let alone set up clinics when there will be little payment from a badly paying health service. As in Ireland,Venezuela has a medical organisation that restricts the number of doctors trained each year in order to maintain a manopoly. In Ireland this means we pay through the nose and queue for hours but in Venezuela this "closed shop" results in the poor having almost no access to health care. President Hugo Chavez is doing his best to reform the health service but as we see in Ireland, highly paid medical-consultant-families who have run a nice little racket for generations, are not so easy to "reform" .

The right wing media is now trying to whip up fear of a "Cuban invasion". There are "reds" and former "Angolan war veterans" being brought in by President Chavez and given citizenship so they can vote for him, they claim. Up to a million, the media screams hysterically! Venezuela unlike the United States of America has very good individual freedom rights , so the media is allowed to contiue abusing the president on a daily basis. Don't forget their crucial role in the attempted coup last year. Do you think ABC or CNN would still be in business if they had organised, through lies and fake footage, a coup against the little Bush?

Apart from 170 doctors, there are another 74 Cuban teachers instituting a literacy campaign. UNESCO has praised this Cuban literacy programme and it is expected to assist a million Venezuelans read and write over the next three months. Text books include topics on sport and family issues, but no sight of Das Kapital!