HUMAN
RIGHTS FOR PHYSICIANS IN CUBA
April 1, 2003
By Susannah Sirkin
Deputy Director, Physicians for Human Rights
While human rights groups in the US rightly insist that the warring parties in
Iraq take care to avoid harming hospitals and other medical facilities, closer
to home in Cuba independent clinics and physicians have recently been deliberate
targets of attack. The clampdown on dissidents across the island - which
coincided with the ground invasion of Iraq - started with the dismantling of an
independent medical clinic in the town of Pedro Betancourt, 150km east of
Havana. Over 150 officers and paramilitaries searched and ransacked the private
home of Miguel Sigler Amaya and his wife Josefa López Peña, where the clinic was
housed, confiscating 90 pounds of medicines: antibiotics, pain killers and
vitamins. Police also seized a metered dose inhaler, an oxygen delivery system,
a glucometer, some physiotherapy equipment, parental infusion appliances and
topical applications. The family's own medications were confiscated too.
The operation was carried out in front of small children and their 71 year old
grandmother, Gloria Amaya, who was later hospitalized with a heart attack. Her
two other sons (also dissidents) were detained as well.
While international attention is focused elsewhere, Cuba's leader Fidel Castro
has ordered his State Security to lock up almost 80 people: independent
journalists, human rights activists, free trade union organizers, poets,
economists, photographers, teachers, and physicians.
In Cuba where achievements in health are the pride of the regime, dissent among
physicians is particularly embarrassing. Yet some members of the medical
community have complaints about the current system. They are concerned with the
government's tendency to limit health facilities for Cubans, alleging that
resources are shifted towards dollars-only "health tourism," making medicines
available only for people with foreign passports who can pay with hard currency.
Irrespective of their political sympathies, physicians are worried that the
extremely low professional salaries in Cuba are particularly dangerous for
medical personnel, who must take extra jobs to make ends meet leading to
absenteeism, overwork or poor work ethics.
Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that an independent Medical
Association started operating in November 2001 (awaiting legal registration).
Physicians from across the island, some still in state jobs, others already
"separated" from official medical institutions, joined forces to set up
independent clinics and pharmacies where equipment and drugs prescribed by
doctors from the state health system and sent from abroad, including from the
Cuban Diaspora, are distributed free. The group's national coordinator is Dr.
Marcelo Cano Rodríguez.
Searching for guidance on how to set up an independent group, Dr. Cano
approached the unofficial Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National
Reconciliation. For the past four years he has been in effect a generic
"physician for human rights." On March 22, Dr. Cano was detained in Las Tunas in
the east end of the island while his home in Havana was searched and medicines
confiscated. At the time, Dr. Cano had been in Las Tunas to investigate the case
of Dr. José Luis García Paneque, another member of the Medical Association
detained four days earlier. There, too, a thorough search led to the seizure of
medicines and medical equipment: four stethoscopes and three glucometers, books,
documents.
Cuba's jailing of dissident doctors is not new. Among the most prominent Cuban
political prisoners is Dr. Oscar Elias
,
a physician who served three years in detention for expressing his political
beliefs only to be released and promptly detained again, this time for
attempting to organize a human rights workshop. He is currently held at
Combinado del Este prison.
For the past three years Physicians for Human Rights has campaigned for the
release of Dr.
through our "Colleague at Risk" program and will now ratchet up its efforts once
more until he is freed. Hunger-striking Cubans seeking Dr. Biscet's release were
among those rounded up by the State Security in Havana recently. As we call for
the release of these Cuban health professionals whose only crime is peacefully
expressing their political views and upholding the ethics of their profession,
we fear that more Cuban "colleagues" will be joining them.
The regime announced that the detained will be charged under the "Law 88" which
punishes anyone who supports or helps to support the US economic embargo against
Cuba. Many in Cuba and in the US find the embargo a counterproductive measure,
but jailing physicians and ransacking independent clinics is not a way of
dealing with the embargo. Whether it be Iraq or Cuba, universally accepted codes
of medical ethics cannot be ignored-if they are, ultimately it is the patient
who stands to lose the most.
Susannah Sirkin
Deputy Director
Physicians for Human Rights
http://www.phrusa.org/campaigns/colleagues/cuba_op-ed.html