Healthcare without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism

Cuba has more medical personnel serving abroad—over 50,000 in 66 countries—than all of the G-7 countries combined and more than the World Health Organization. For the last five decades, they have been a leading force in the developing world, providing humanitarian aid (or “cooperation,” as Cuba’s communist government prefers) and initiating programs for preventative care and medical training.

In Healthcare without Borders, John Kirk examines the role of Cuban medical teams in disaster relief, biotechnology joint ventures, and in the Latin American School—the largest medical faculty in the world. He looks at their responses to various crises worldwide, including the 1960 earthquake in Chile, the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, the earthquake that wracked Haiti in 2010 and the subsequent cholera outbreak, and the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

Kirk issues an informative and enlightening corrective for what he describes as the tendency of the industrialized world’s media to ignore or underreport this phenomenon as one of the positive aspects of the Cuban revolutionary process. In the process, Kirk explores the philosophical underpinnings of human rights and access to medical care at the core of Cuba’s medical internationalism programs and partnerships.