Brazil Forging Economic Ties With Cuba, While Hiring Its Doctors
Brazil Forging Economic Ties With Cuba, While Hiring Its Doctors
By SIMON ROMERO and VICTORIA BURNETT
Published: December 29, 2013
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Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Idarmis González, seated, a Cuban doctor, spoke with the mother of an infant suffering from dehydration
and diarrhea last month in the slum of Jacarezinho in Rio de Janeiro. [/font]
RIO DE JANEIRO — The conditions around the public health clinic in the vast slum of Jacarezinho are precisely what most Brazilian doctors prefer to avoid: dealers of crack cocaine ply their trade along dilapidated train tracks, and the odor from a crematory for stray dogs overwhelms patients and medical workers.
“Of course I knew this mission wouldn’t be easy,” said Idarmis González, 45, one of the more than 4,500 Cuban doctors the Brazilian government is hiring to work in far-flung villages in the Amazon and slums in major cities. “We go where other doctors do not,” said Ms. González as she examined an infant suffering from dehydration and diarrhea.
Faced with a wave of street protests in 2013 over deplorable public services, President Dilma Rousseff has made the hiring of Cuban doctors a cornerstone of her response to the turmoil, overriding the resistance of doctors’ unions to sending the Cubans, trained in a Communist country that says it has a surplus of doctors, into neglected parts of Brazil’s public health system. But the project also points to a broader ambition of Brazil’s government, which is vying to exert influence in Cuba as the authorities in Havana slowly expose the island nation’s economy to market forces.
Brazilian exports to Cuba are surging, quadrupling over the past decade to more than $450 million a year. The inroads made by Brazilian companies in Cuba, relying on loans from Brazil’s national development bank and aid projects that share Brazil’s expertise in tropical agriculture, reflect a sophisticated projection of soft power in a country where Washington’s influence remains negligible.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/world/americas/brazil-forging-economic-ties-with-cuba-while-hiring-its-doctors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0