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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/06/how-cuba-is-eradicating-child-mortality-and-banishing-the-diseases-of-the-poor/">peoplesdispatch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How Cuba is eradicating child mortality and banishing the diseases of the poor</h1>
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<a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/06/how-cuba-is-eradicating-child-mortality-and-banishing-the-diseases-of-the-poor/">July 06, 2022</a> by <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/06/how-cuba-is-eradicating-child-mortality-and-banishing-the-diseases-of-the-poor/"></a><a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/author/vijay/">Vijay Prashad</a>, <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/author/manolo-de-los-santos/">Manolo De Los Santos</a>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><img src="cid:ii_l59ta6z90" alt="image.png" width="392" height="221"><br><br><p><font size="1">The authors at a clinic in Palpite in Cuba. Photo: Odalys Miranda/Twitter
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<p>Palpite, Cuba, is just a few miles away from Playa Girón, along the
Bay of Pigs, where the United States attempted to overthrow the Cuban
Revolution in 1961. Down a modest street in a small building with a
Cuban flag and a large picture of Fidel Castro near the front door, Dr.
Dayamis Gómez La Rosa sees patients from 8 am to 5 pm. In fact, that is
an inaccurate sentence. Dr. Dayamis, like most primary care doctors in
Cuba, lives above the clinic that she runs. “I became a doctor,” she
told us as we sat in the clinic’s waiting room, “because I wanted to
make the world a better place.” Her father was a bartender, and her
mother was a housecleaner, but “thanks to the Revolution,” she says, she
is a primary care doctor, and her brother is a dentist. Patients come
when they need care, even in the middle of the night.</p>
<p>Apart from the waiting room, the clinic only has three other rooms,
all of them small and clean. The 1,970 people in Palpite come to see Dr.
Dayamis, who emphasizes that she has in her care several pregnant women
and infants. She wants to talk about pregnancy and children because she
wants to let me know that over the past three years, not one infant has
died in her town or in the municipality. “The last time an infant
died,” she said, “was in 2008 when a child was born prematurely and had
great difficulty breathing.” When we asked her how she remembered that
death with such clarity, she said that for her as a doctor any death is
terrible, but the death of a child must be avoided at all costs. “I wish
I did not have to experience that,” she said.</p>
<h3><strong>Eradicate the diseases of the poor</strong></h3>
<p>The region of the Zapata Swamp, where the Bay of Pigs is located,
before the Revolution, had an infant mortality rate of 59 per 1,000 live
births. The population of the area, mostly engaged in subsistence
fishing and in the charcoal trade, lived in great poverty. Fidel<a href="https://www.granma.cu/cuba/2019-12-23/historica-cena-de-nochebuena-en-la-cienaga-de-zapata-23-12-2019-14-12-28"> spent</a>
the first Christmas Eve after the Revolution of 1959 with the newly
formed cooperative of charcoal producers, listening to them talk about
their problems and working with them to find a way to exit the condition
of hunger, illiteracy, and ill-health. A large-scale project of
transformation had been set into motion a few months before, which drew
in hundreds of very poor people into a process to lift themselves up
from the wretched conditions that afflicted them. This is the reason why
these people rose in large numbers to defend the Revolution against the
attack by the US and its mercenaries in 1961.</p>
<p>To move from 59 infant deaths out of every 1,000 live births to no
infant deaths in the matter of a few decades is an extraordinary feat.
It was done, Dr. Dayamis says, because the Cuban Revolution pays an
enormous attention to the health of the population. Pregnant mothers are
given regular care from primary care doctors and gynecologists and
their infants are tended by pediatricians—all of it paid from the social
wealth of the country. Small towns such as Palpite do not have
specialists such as gynecologists and pediatricians, but within a short
ride a few miles away, they can access these doctors in Playa Larga.</p>
<p>Walking through the Playa Giron museum earlier that day, the museum’s
director Dulce María Limonta del Pozo tells us that the many of the
captured mercenaries were returned to the US in exchange for food and
medicines for children; it is telling that this is what the Cuban
Revolution demanded. From early into the Revolution, literacy campaigns
and vaccination campaigns developed to address the facts of poverty.
Now, Dr. Dayamis reports, each child gets between 12 and 16 vaccinations
for such ailments as smallpox and hepatitis.</p>
<p>In Havana’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (<a href="https://www.cigb.edu.cu/en/home/">CIGB</a>),
Dr. Merardo Pujol Ferrer tells us that the country has almost
eradicated hepatitis B using a vaccine developed by their Center. That
vaccine—Heberbiovac HB—has been administered to 70 million people around
the world. “We believe that this vaccine is safe and effective,” he
said. “It could help to eradicate hepatitis around the world,
particularly in poorer countries.” All the children in her town are
vaccinated against hepatitis, Dr. Dayamis says. “The health care system
ensures that not one person dies from diarrhea or malnutrition, and not
one person dies from diseases of poverty.”</p>
<h3><strong>Public health</strong></h3>
<p>What ails the people of Palpite, Dr. Dayamis says, are now the
diseases that one sees in richer countries. It is one of the paradoxes
of Cuba, which remains a country of limited means—largely because of the
US government’s blockade of this island of 11 million people—and yet
has transcended the diseases of poverty. The new illnesses that she says
are hypertension and cardiovascular diseases as well as prostate and
breast cancer. These problems, she points out, must be dealt with by
public education, which is why she has a radio show on<em><a href="https://www.radiovictoriadegiron.icrt.cu/"> Radio Victoria de Girón</a></em>, the local community station, each Thursday, called Education for Health.</p>
<p>If we invest in sports, says Raúl Fornés Valenciano, the vice-president of the Institute of Physical Education and Recreation (<a href="https://www.inder.gob.cu/">INDER</a>),
then we will have less problems of health. Across the country, INDER
focuses on getting the entire population active with a variety of sports
and physical exercises. Over 70,000 sports health workers collaborate
with the schools and the centers for the elderly to provide
opportunities for leisure time to be spent in physical activity. This,
along with the public education campaign that Dr. Dayamis told us about,
are key mechanisms to prevent chronic diseases from harming the
population.</p>
<p>If you take a boat out of the Bay of Pigs and land in other Caribbean
countries, you will find yourself in a situation where healthcare is
almost nonexistent. In the Dominican Republic, for example, infant
mortality<a href="https://data.unicef.org/country/dom/"> is</a> at 34
per 1,000 live births. These countries—unlike Cuba—have not been able to
harness the commitment and ingenuity of people such as Dr. Dayamis and
Dr. Merardo. In these other countries, children die in conditions where
no doctor is present to mourn their loss decades later.</p>
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