The New Yorker Stresses Cuba Medical Cooperation against Ebola

Washington—An article published on the US publication The New Yorker said that Cuba is the country with the first-level response in the world before the international crisis that have appeared over the past years.

Entitled Cuba´s Ebola Diplomacy, the article signed by journalist Jon Lee Anderson stresses the significant contribution by Cuba to the fight against Ebola, even over developed countries like the United States, the U.K. and China.

"All of these countries are following the lead of Cuba," reads the article and adds that the island " has long been known for its roving teams of medical doctors and nurses. Indeed, Cuba, an island nation of eleven million people, with eighty-three thousand trained doctors—one of the highest proportions of doctors in the world."

Anderson also said that when Cuban authorities requested volunteers to fight Ebola in Western Africa, over 15 thousand professionals offered to go, including intensive care doctors and nurses. He recalled that Cuba sent hundreds of doctors to Pakistan in the aftermath of the 2005 quake that hit that nation as well as to Haiti following a devastating earthquake in 2010.
" There are an estimated fifty thousand Cuban doctors working in slums and rural areas in as many as thirty other developing nations around the world," the journalist noted and also referred to the hundreds of thousands students from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States who are taking medical courses at Havana's Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM)
And as to Cuba's assistance to Africa now, Anderson says that " Cuba's outsize gesture in West Africa has not gone unnoticed, and may pave the way for the start of some Ebola diplomacy between Havana and Washington." He also recalled that on October 19th, Secretary of State John Kerry named Cuba as a nation that had made an "impressive" effort in the anti-Ebola campaign and that upon Returning from a fact-finding tour of the Ebola-struck countries, the U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power also pointedly praised the Cuban mission.

"The Ebola diplomacy follows a friendly handshake that Raul Castro and President Obama exchanged at Nelson Mandela's funeral in South Africa, last December, and has added to anticipation that the Obama Administration may seek to finally lift the remaining restrictions in the United States' trade embargo against Cuba."

You can read The New Yorker article at: http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cubas-ebola-diplomacy