Cuba’s Ebola Diplomacy
November 4, 2014
Cuba’s Ebola Diplomacy
By Jon Lee Anderson
Even in this age of international coalitions, the one arrayed against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is impressive. In September, more than a hundred and thirty nations voted in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring the virus, which is rampant in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, a threat to international security and creating the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, or UNMEER, devoted to fighting the virus. The mission was put under the control of Anthony Banbury, a veteran U.N. troubleshooter, who hoped to tackle the job without the red tape that often bogs down U.N. missions. Within a week, Banbury had assembled a team of international experts, selected from thousands volunteers from the U.N.’s myriad agencies, and headed off to kick-start operations at his new field headquarters, in Accra, Ghana.
President Obama has also made Ebola a top priority, ordering sixty-five health professionals, supported by nearly four thousand U.S. troops, to Liberia to help oversee the construction of eighteen mobile health clinics there. The United Kingdom has undertaken a similar initiative, dispatching seven hundred and fifty troops and medical teams to Sierra Leone, a former British colony. Other countries, including Japan and India, have made donations of money, equipment, and small teams of medical personnel. Last week, after coming under criticism for not doing more, China announced that it will send its own sizeable military contingent and medical corps to the region.
But, in a sense, all of these countries are following the lead of Cuba. On September 12th, President Raúl Castro’s health minister announced that Cuba would send nearly five hundred health-care professionals to West Africa. Since then, a hundred and sixty-five Cubans have arrived in Sierra Leone and a second group of eighty-three have arrived in Liberia and Guinea; two hundred more are expected. No other country, to date, has contributed as many trained health-care professionals to the Ebola crisis as Cuba has. (The closest parallel to Cuba’s effort may be Doctors Without Borders, the French-based humanitarian organization, which currently has more than two hundred and fifty international medical staff in the region, as well as more than three thousand local workers.)
Cuba 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—has become something like the world’s first responder to international crises in recent years. It dispatched hundreds of Cuban medical personnel to Pakistan after an earthquake in 2005 and to Haiti following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake there, as well as to other far-flung emergencies. At any given time, 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; up to thirty thousand work in Venezuela, in a bilateral aid-for-oil arrangement that was initiated by the late President Hugo Chávez.
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