Cuban health personnel don’t come free… we pay

On the face of it, the dispatch of 217 Cuban medical personnel to South Africa to help in the Covid-19 campaign seems like an altruistic gesture.

Cuba, despite what Western propaganda over the years has maintained, has a highly developed medical service … providing universal healthcare to the people of the island was one of the first things Fidel Castro put in motion on ousting the dictator Batista in 1959.

And the reality is that South Africa needs all the help it can get because we haven’t even glimpsed how bad this pandemic is going to be.

It is also true that Cuba has a history of comradely solidarity (to use overworked socialist terms) with Third World countries, especially those in Africa – and the government in Havana has long and deep links with the ANC.

However, what is often missing from the romanticised view of Cuban “internationalism” and revolutionary solidarity is that, in the Cold War years, the militarised country was employed as a proxy for the Soviet Union in furthering the aims of Moscow. Havana was heavily subsidised by the Soviets and, in addition, was paid by countries like Angola for the use of its troops during that particularly bloody East-West clash there, which was a contest of ideologies and arms and only vaguely connected to the fight against apartheid.

Cuban medics are still being sent around the world – and the terms are the same. The host country pays. And there are credible reports that this “solidarity” is little more than indentured labour, because the bulk of the “charge” is paid to the government in Havana, while the workers themselves get only a small portion.

While the ANC clearly feels it owes a debt for Cuban help in the past, we must ask why South Africans of today have to pay that debt.

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