The pedagogy of Cuban doctors

(originally published in Major Card)

"The Cuban doctors look like domestic workers." This statement, the most expressive of the wave of intolerance and racist discrimination, made by a right-wing Brazilian journalist, unknowingly represents the most significant compliment to Cuba.
Given the population's need for medical care, the Brazilian government, after calling on Brazilian doctors to fill positions in the country's most underserved and least attended regions, made an agreement with the Cuban government to bring healthcare professionals from that country to Brazil, a country that unquestionably has one of the best, if not the best, social medicine systems in the world. The extraordinary health indicators of the Cuban population – from infant mortality to life expectancy at birth – even more so considering the country's level of economic development, confirm this assessment.

This agreement, which could have been simply another one among the many signed between Brazil and Cuba, generated a wave of reactions that provide an unprecedented and unexpectedly profound social diagnosis of both societies. It begins with the Brazilian doctors themselves, the vast majority of whom graduated from public universities – the best in the country – but who are practically not obligated to give back to the society that educated them, free of charge. They frequently complete their studies and open practices in the most affluent neighborhoods of major Brazilian cities to serve a clientele with significant purchasing power.

As a result, the map of the country's diseases and the location of doctors are often brutally mismatched, practically the opposite: where the diseases are, the doctors are not; where the doctors are, the diseases are not.

Even so, after refusing to treat the poorest population – the vast majority – they tried to prevent the Brazilian government from bringing in doctors from abroad – from countries other than Cuba – to treat the population. They held demonstrations, created embarrassing situations for the Cuban doctors upon their arrival, and announced that they would campaign against Dilma's re-election, believing they had political authority over their patients.

The statement that begins this article fits into this scenario of elitism and lack of social sensitivity among Brazilian doctors. The phrase, which aims to disqualify Cuban female doctors because, instead of the image of the white male doctor with the features of doctors from Hollywood films, they are people born among the Cuban people, reveals itself as immense praise for Cuban society and a critique of Brazilian society. Women of humble origin, who in Brazil would be domestic workers, are normally able to become doctors in Cuba and express their solidarity with other peoples in need of the professionals that Cuba manages to train in excess for the needs of its country.

This reversal of the meaning of the phrase also occurred on a more general level within Brazilian society, which, initially confused, reacted very quickly and positively, with over 80% supporting the arrival of Cuban doctors in Brazil. This was due to the needs that these doctors began to meet, as well as the attention that very broad sectors of the Brazilian population, previously without any assistance or with extremely precarious medical care, immediately began to receive. Cities that had never had a doctor, where the population had to travel kilometers for sporadic assistance, began to experience an essential right to direct and permanent medical care, thanks to the Cuban doctors.

It's a public health program, but one that contains within itself a lesson, a political pedagogy of great clarity – which is what most bothers the Brazilian right. Personnel trained in public universities – and in Cuba, all universities are public – must prioritize meeting the fundamental needs of their people, who, in addition to everything else, pay the taxes that finance public universities, but who, as a rule, cannot have their children access to these same universities – even less so to medical courses.

Brazil is making unprecedented progress in combating inequality, poverty, and misery, but it still lacks a corresponding improvement in the educational structures that train medical professionals. Hence the support from Cuba – which Dilma thanked Fidel for during the recent CELAC meeting in Havana, when the first part of the Mariel port was inaugurated, a project Brazil is building on the island, contributing to the breaking of the US-imposed blockade.

Cuban doctors are better than most doctors Brazil has today because – in addition to their excellent professional training – they are better citizens, shaped by a society guided not by commercial medicine, but by the real needs of the population. The arrival of Cuban doctors allows, like no political education manual, the clarification of principles of capitalist societies – focused on exchange values ​​– and socialist societies – focused on use values. One attending to market demands, the other, to the needs of the people.