Cuban doctors assist victims of Hurricane Felix in Nicaragua

Cuban doctors assist victims of Hurricane Felix in Nicaragua

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua.— Cuban doctors stationed in this city in northeastern Nicaragua are continuing to attend to victims of Hurricane Felix, in the midst of the devastation left in its wake, including the destruction of the local hospital.

The precarious conditions have not affected the determination of the health professionals, who are providing care for patients in improvised operating rooms and wards set up in the local offices of the National Technological Institute.

Doctor Osmar Martínez, coordinator of the Cuban medical brigade in the Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic (RAAN), told Prensa Latina that since the onslaught of the hurricane in the early hours of this past Tuesday, they have attended to more than 300 people.

"We have performed Cesareans here," Martínez explained, indicating one of the institute’s classrooms, which has been turned into a maternity ward, where at that moment, a Nicaraguan radiologist was doing an ultrasound for a pregnant woman from the Miskito community.

Along with Cuban doctors and local healthcare personnel, those working shoulder-to-shoulder with them in these improvised facilities include 20 young Nicaraguans in their fifth year of medical school at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM, in Cuba).

The group is part of the 59 students who in the weeks previous to the disaster had been carrying out community work in remote areas of Nicaragua under the supervision of instructors in the Cuban medical brigade.

According to preliminary estimates, the hurricane that hit Nicaragua’s northeastern coast as a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale (maximum) killed more than 40 people, destroyed some 10,000 homes and affected 50,000 people, leaving many homeless.

"We were also hit," Dr. Martínez commented half-jokingly, noting that Felix’s 260-kph winds destroyed the roof of the house where the brigade has been staying at the Institute since they arrived on April 25. But he added that despite the adversities, the morale of the doctors working in Puerto Cabezas was high, and had received a boost of encouragement via telephone calls from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations and the Council of State. (PL)

Great.

Does anybody know if they sent any doctors to Hurricane Mitch a few years back?

Free People's Movement

Quote:

Cuba was also among the first countries to send doctors and other aid when Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, even though the puppet governments of those two countries supported the U.S. government in its attack on Cuba in the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission.

Cuba volunteers everything they can spare without prejudice to anyone. It's perhaps the most generous country in this hemisphere. They even offered supplies, equipment, and doctors to us during Hurricane Katrina. But of course our government was too bull-headed to accept.