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</font><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/"><img src="cid:6.1.2.0.2.20041227085654.020fd4f8@66.103.156.66.1" width=250 height=28 alt="c78489.gif"><br><br>
<h2><font face="arial" size=3><b><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424776.200" eudora="autourl">http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424776.200</a></b></font></h2><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1>Printed
on Mon Dec 27 15:14:58 GMT 2004<br><br>
</font><h2><font face="arial" size=3><b>Interview: Aleida Guevara, Che's
daughter</b></font></h2><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By Liz
Else <br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2><b>Aleida Guevara March - her full name
- studied medicine at the University of Havana, spending her final year
at the University of Managua in Nicaragua. She specialises in children's
allergies. She has worked as a doctor in Angola, Nicaragua and Ecuador,
and she helps run the Che Guevara Studies Center of Havana. Her father
qualified as a doctor in 1953, specialising in dermatology, and he and
his wife Aleida March travelled the world between 1961 and 1965 as
ambassadors for Cuba. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967 when young Aleida
was six<br><br>
Were you following in your father's footsteps by becoming a
doctor?<br><br>
</b>I follow the steps of my people!<br><br>
<b>But had you always wanted to be a doctor?<br><br>
</b>Yes, at the age of 4 I said I was going to be a doctor specialising
in children. And I was loyal to that. I always liked children. My mother
gave birth to four children, and for every one she had a Caesarean. The
last time there was something that was not right. There was a stitch that
wasn't right when the Caesarean was done with that last baby and it got
infected. I helped disinfect the area with a bit of alcohol. I was just
four-and-a-half when that happened.<br><br>
<b>What is it like being a doctor in Cuba today?<br><br>
</b>Sometimes people joke that we are always giving away doctors. There
are thousands of Cuban doctors in Venezuela. We've got 25,000 health
specialists helping other people around the world. So the ones remaining
in Cuba have to work more. We offer our help to whoever wants it. This is
very important now. Fidel Castro has said to the developed world that we
will bring the human element, but they have to bring the material things.
So we have been taking part in very interesting projects in developing
countries with the UK, France, Germany. They send money to buy medicines
and materials and we provide all the professionals.<br><br>
<b>How many doctors are there in Cuba per head of population?<br><br>
</b>One doctor per 164 inhabitants.It used to be 1 per 168 but it has
come down. We live as a poor nation but we die as a rich one.<br><br>
<b>What kind of effect does the US blockade still have on Cuba?<br><br>
</b>The US is isolating Cuba, and that is very costly for the country.
For example, my hospital, the William Soler Children's Hospital in
Havana, has 400 beds but it has only one X-ray machine, and that is more
than 40 years old.<br><br>
<b>Are you short of medicines?<br><br>
</b>Thanks to European solidarity, there's a project in Europe called
MediCuba in which they buy raw materials and send it to Cuba. We
manufacture the medicines, and they are sold at the price it costs to
manufacture them. So that organisation skirts the blockade, and it also
encourages Cuba to promote its own pharmaceutical industry. We don't get
all the materials we need, but it has been an important help. We buy
other raw materials with funds from tourism.<br><br>
Sometimes we have to use intermediaries because if the US detects who has
been selling the raw materials to us, they sanction them. So it's very
expensive for Cuba - and it's very difficult. Something that would
normally cost $500, Cubans might have to pay $20,000 for it.<br><br>
<b>That sounds like you need your own full-blown pharmaceutical
industry?<br><br>
</b>The objective of every country is to develop its own industry. It's
not good for us to receive things if we are unable to produce them. While
there has been some progress, I think that we are doing better in areas
like biotechnology.<br><br>
<b>So Cuba has great ingenuity, but still very little in the way of
scientific equipment or state-of-the-art technology?<br><br>
</b>Yes. It's a problem. But we manage, thanks to courageous companies
who are interested in having their techniques used in Cuba. For example,
when we started to deal with haemorrhagic dengue fever, we discovered
that in Europe they were producing interferon. We learned from them, and
now we are producing it better than those who taught us, because we have
access to plenty of blood in Cuba and we can work with more
certainty.<br><br>
<b>Why is that?<br><br>
</b>Because the people of Cuba will always donate blood. We have to tell
them stop giving blood. When the Twin Towers were attacked, Cubans gave
blood to New York citizens immediately - our quarrels are not with them -
and it was sent. When there are catastrophes in South America or other
places, Cubans always give blood. We think that the duty of a nation is
to help other nations, and we can do it. It is beautiful. It is important
to feel good with yourself, and Cuban people feel satisfied when they do
this type of thing. I think they are very positive things. And we've got
to do more.<br><br>
<b>You've worked as a doctor all your working life - and now you are also
speaking for Cuba at all sorts of international events.<br><br>
</b>I've been a doctor since I was 23. I'm now 43 and I've been
campaigning round the world for a while, since my daughters were grown
up. But before that I was working a lot behind the scenes.<br><br>
<b>Should science have a higher profile with people who say another world
is possible?<br><br>
</b>We who are of the left are fighting so that there will be more people
in the world who will have all of the possibilities. I think that for us
science is crucial, starting from the way we use our resources to the way
we will be able to use whatever comes to us. For example, in the early
1960s my dad said that he would like to study nuclear science because at
the time it was something from the future.<br><br>
He also wanted to bring it into perspective, bearing in mind the
realities of the planet - to develop science without killing the world.
That is something we must bring back in our time. The challenge is to
make use of the very interesting scientific developments that are being
carried out without destroying the environment. There has to be a
balance.<br><br>
<b>What about the relationship between indigenous peoples and science.
What have you learned from your travels?<br><br>
</b>There are big issues here. Many people say that Africans, for
example, don't know how to make use of science. But those people don't
realise that for Africans there is an element of survival attached to it.
If they accept all the scientific development and the industrial
development that the white man gives them, then they lose their own
culture and they lose the opportunity of being able to keep their land.
So we must take care when dealing with aboriginal peoples. We must bring
science to them without breaking their important traditions.<br><br>
Indigenous people can teach us a lot of things. For example, when I was
visiting a tribe in Venezuela, a woman said she didn't want to be seen by
a white doctor. Why? Because, she said: "What is the link between my
name and the pain I feel?" Then I realised that as a doctor the
first thing I did when a patient came to see me was to ask for their
name, surname, address, age - and only then did I ask what the matter
was. The indigenous lady taught me that the first thing I should ask is
what's the matter. These are all small things that modify human
behaviour.<br><br>
<b>What would your father have thought of what you do now?<br><br>
</b>If he were alive I wouldn't be doing it. I would be next to him all
the time.<br><br>
<b>Is he still your hero?<br><br>
</b>Yes. No doubt about it. He is the most complete man I've ever
met.<br><br>
<b>Do you remember him clearly from when you were a little
girl?<br><br>
</b>I remember very few things as a small child, but my mother loved him
very much and she brought that to us and taught us about him. We found
out a lot more as we read all the unpublished and published material
about him, like The Motorcycle Diaries. That's natural: he became not
only my dad, he's now my friend, my teacher. He is very important for
me.<br><br>
<b>Do you still talk to Fidel Castro?<br><br>
</b>Not as much as I would like. We do speak. He loves me very much like
an uncle, and I love him. He says sometimes he dreams my father is still
alive.<br><br>
</font><h5><font face="arial" size=2 color="#016798"><b>Poor but
proud</b></font></h5><font face="arial" size=2>Few Cubans would be
surprised to know how highly the UN rates their country's level of
development. Its 2004 Human Development Report consistently ranks Cuba in
the top band, outranking middle-band nations such as Belarus and
Bangladesh, and far ahead of the likes of Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra
Leone.<br><br>
The national health spend shows Cuba allocating just over 7 per cent of
GDP to healthcare, amounting to $229 per capita, compared with 13.9 per
cent and $4887 per capita in the US, and 7.6 per cent and $1989 in the
UK.<br><br>
Despite the low per-capita spend, life expectancy at birth is an 76.7
years (77 in the US and 78.1 in the UK). Infant mortality has fallen from
34 per 1000 live births in 1970 to 7 per 100,000 now; in the same period,
the US figure fell from 20 to 7, and the UK from 18 to 5. Some 98 per
cent of Cuban 1-year-olds are fully immunised against measles (91 per
cent in the US, 83 per cent in the UK). Cubans, Americans and Britons all
have the same level (95 to 100 per cent) of "sustainable access to
affordable essential drugs".<br><br>
<b>Medical excellence<br><br>
</b>One of the biggest differences is the number of doctors, and here
Cuba is streets ahead. According to the UN report, Cuba boasts a total of
596 physicians per 100,000 people, while the US has 279 and the UK only
164. Patrick Pietroni, who organised two GP study trips from the UK to
Cuba in 2000 and 2001, says Cuba has a family doctor for every 500 to 700
people, compared with one per 1800 to 2000 in the UK.<br><br>
Medical exports and services are ranked sixth in the country's economy,
earning foreign exchange worth $250 million in 2002, of which biotech
contributed $150 million. The country's researchers discovered a
meningitis-B vaccine in the late 1980s, which GlaxoSmithKline plans to
market under licence in Europe and possibly in the US. Over the past few
years, the biggest earner has been a hepatitis-B vaccine, which Cuba has
exported to more than 30 countries.<br><br>
Finding a bigger foothold in the international pharmaceutical game will
be tough going, given the US blockade. But Cuba does have some
joint-venture European partners to help with the costly process of
developing cancer treatments, including the promising TheraCIM h-R3 for
head and neck cancer.<br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=1>Printed on Mon Dec 27
15:14:58 GMT 2004<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3> <br><br>
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