Guyanese messengers of death from Cuba have returned

Nov 18, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Many of the Cuban-trained Guyanese doctors are hopelessly incompetent. They have killed countless of poor patients at the Georgetown Public Hospital, (the middle classes and wealthy folks do not even drive past the Georgetown Public Hospital, do not even visit it much less to become patients there), the West Demerara Hospital, New Amsterdam Hospital among others.
There are four sickening dimensions to note about the medical training programme Cuba offered Guyana from the seventies onward. Before we enumerate these aspects it is factual to state that under the Presidency of Forbes Burnham, Cuba provided top quality education to the scholarship holders. This was definitely out of a mark of respect for President Burnham. Those batches from the seventies to the time of Burnham’s death in 1985 were very competent doctors. Some went on to train in western universities and became very good.
Here are the dimensions. First, because of severe pressure of President Reagan on Cuba, Cuba’s economy began to endure serious hardships. Then the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, told Fidel Castro that the USSR could no longer bankroll it.
Then came the dénouement. The USSR collapsed and Boris Yeltsin who became President of Russia no longer saw Cuba as a country to finance. The USSR support for Cuba before the collapse of the USSR exceeded anything the Americans gave Israel. The USSR virtually kept the Cuban economy alive. By 1991, Cuba’s economy had virtually collapsed.
Secondly, the Cuban scholarship was all that Cuba could have offered friendly Third World countries; it never exported anything in the form of aid to the Third World. In the main, all Guyana ever got from Cuba from the Burnham era right up to November 2016 were these medical scholarships and Cuban doctors working in the health system.
Cuba used these generous scholarship offers to Guyana as a form of genuine camaraderie under President Burnham. When the Cuban economy declined Cuba continued the policy because it was a way of maintaining the friendship it started with Guyana in 1974 but there was a gargantuan BUT. The Cuban economy could not sustain these training programs. What happened then was that they became a caricature which brings us to the third aspect.
These students were put up at mediocre medical schools bereft of resources in rural Cuba. The training was half-baked and the professors were ordinary doctors who were not in mainstream academia. This columnist had a friend who requested soap, washing power and tooth paste. I sent these things regularly. There was no water in the dorms and the toilets never flushed. From the nineties onwards none of those students were placed in institutions in Havana.
In the early nineties, Cuba changed its policy and disallowed these students to do their internship at Cuban hospitals. The Cuban Government was saying don’t kill Cubans, go back home and kill your own people. Literally speaking that is what many of these half-trained kids have been doing.
The fourth dimension is that the Guyanese authorities would request the Cuban Government to give a passing grade to those who were abysmal failures and quite barefacedly the Cubans did just that. What we have been having then in public medical service are many doctors that didn’t graduate, that know even less than well trained Guyanese nurses.
At one time St. Joseph Mercy Hospital had a nursing programme that was far higher than anything the Cubans offered these Guyanese students.
The situation came to a standstill because the present Government is refusing to ask the Cuban Government to pass a few dozens of these students that have failed. This explains why some of these returnees are not employed. What the PPP Government has done for which their Ministers should be criminally prosecuted, was that they let loose semi-trained medical personnel into the system and the casualty toll was high.
In my long journalistic career I have seen these people do the most glaring, incompetent misdiagnosis. I have seen these people offer treatment to patients that caused serious harm to poor folks. Death came in many instances. This article here is one of several columns I have done alerting the Guyanese nation as to what some of the half-baked “doctors” were doing to poor people.
I say with deep seriousness, some of these trainees could not locate the required vein of a patient. These failures with Cuban training have sadly killed too many poor people and this society never ever debated this tragedy. This is one of the reasons I dislike the PPP leadership. They are equally responsible for these deaths and the society too for remaining idiotically silent all these years.

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