Cuba Defends the Altruism of its Medical Missions

 

Havana, April 17 (ACN) Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said that Cuba’s Medicine Academy is based on the highest human values, while the enemies of the Cuban Revolution keep betting to selfishness, individualism and the worst of human nature.

In the podcast entitled “Desde la Presidencia” (From the Presidency), the head of state said that Cuban medical missions defend the values instilled and defended by the Revolution, which are part of the very essence of Medicine and arise from the profound ethical meaning of the so-called Hippocratic Oath.

The head of state said that in Cuba a student does not need to pay a cent, as it happens in other countries, to take a medical course, because all Cubans have full access to study medicine, either the children of a businessman, or of a farmer, a worker, a single mother or of low-income families.

Diaz-Canel called on Honduran medical doctor Luther Castillo to share his experiences. Castillo, a member of the Garifuna people, descendants of African and Caribbean aborigines, is a Honduran government minister and studied medicine at Havana’s Medical School.

Luther addressed Cuban medical cooperation and the training of doctors here from South nations and also from the United States.

Doctor Carlos Ricardo Perez, Red Cross general secretary, said that calling a free person a slave is disrespectful and an offense.

The Hippocratic Oath, is that one, which physicians take by committing themselves to carry out their profession with dignity and consciousness and prioritize the health and the life of the sick and to keep the honor and noble traditions of the medical profession.

By the end of the program, the head of state stressed that Cuban medical cooperation has assisted millions of people in some 165 countries of the world over the past 60 years, and have saved lives in emergency situations and under natural disasters

In most cases, Cuba not only offered free collaboration, as far as we were able to, but also kept up the assistance and even set up schools to train local human resources.