By Norm Dixon
"Cubans in Klerksdorp — it sounds like a nightmare sequence from the commie bashing photo-comic, Grensvegter, circa 1979. But the doctors were greeted at the once racially exclusive hospital with no hostility, though much curiosity", wrote Justin Pearce, reporting for South Africa's Weekly Mail and Guardian on the arrival of 96 Cuban doctors.
The doctors were greeted with rousing cheers when they arrived at Johannesburg airport on February 27. A large crowd held aloft placards and banners reading, "Welcome to Mpumalanga province Cuban doctors" and "Long live the spirit of Che Guevara". The doctors were accompanied by Cuba's deputy health minister, Dr Jorge Antelo, who has worked as a doctor in Angola. They were greeted on the tarmac by South African health minister Dr Nkosazana Zuma.
"They were met by a crowd singing loudly enough to raise eyebrows in the next-door conference room where one of South Africa's giant insurance corporations was holding a meeting. 'Viva Fidel Castro!' chanted the reception party. 'Phanzi [away with] America! Long live the South Africa-Cuba alliance! Viva the spirit of internationalism!'", reported Pearce.
Dr Leandro Ruyz, one of the doctors, a day later found himself assigned to Klerksdorp Hospital, built to serve whites in the western Transvaal. It now serves the North West Province, where it is not uncommon for people to travel all day to find even the most basic medical services, and where 60% of public health posts are filled by people from overseas because South African doctors have left for the private sector or emigrated.
Ruyz is among 14 doctors assigned who will undergo a two-week briefing in Klerksdorp before heading into the remote fragments of what used to be Bophuthatswana. Ruyz and his compatriots must now grapple with a health situation starkly at odds with their own experience in socialist Cuba.
"In Cuba only a few old people have TB", Ruyz told the Weekly Mail. "In 1959 we had a revolution and everyone born after that was vaccinated at birth." In South Africa, TB is an epidemic.
Cuba's health care system is rated by the World Health Organisation as among the best in the world. It has been sending doctors to help poor and disadvantaged countries for 30 years. Cuban doctors are educated for free.
"In other developing countries you see lots of things you would never see in Cuba", said Ruyz, who has also spent two years in Zambia. "In Cuba the infant mortality rate is 9.4 per thousand — in some African countries it is 40 per thousand."
The Cuban doctors' attitude towards health as a service is also starkly different from the attitude of South Africa's mostly white and privileged doctors, who serve a compulsory year as interns and then in their vast majority go into private practice or go overseas. The Cubans will fill the gap while South Africa trains new doctors and puts in place a system that gives greater emphasis to preventive health care and clinics close to the communities they serve.
Justin Pearce points out, "While the salaries the doctors will be earning are many times what they were paid in Cuba, and part of that money will trickle back home to help the ailing Cuban economy, there is no hint of insincerity when Dr Garcia Sarria says: 'I came here to help a population which does not have enough medical services. We are giving our services because we want to help.'"