Castro's signature humanitarian achievements

Excerpted from HuffPost

Suriname's Gift to Fidel done by
AlphaMax's Ruben Karsters

"Six of Castro's signature humanitarian achievements.

The National Literacy Campaign. 
In 1961, in what Oxfam described as "one of the most successful initiatives of its kind, [Castro] mobilized teachers, workers, and secondary school students to teach more than 700,000 persons how to read." By 1962 -- just three years after the revolution -- Cuba's literacy rate was 96 per cent, one of the highest in the world. Since then, Cuba has dispatched literacy volunteers to other under-developed countries to improve their literacy. Cuba has a higher literacy rate than Canada.

Cuban public health care is the best in the developing world. Cuba has 90,000 physicians, more than we do in Canada. On a per capita basis they have three times more than we do. The infant mortality rate is lower than it is in Canada, and life expectancy is about the same. Cuba also produces 70 per cent of its own medicines, and so the prices are a fraction of what we pay.

Cuban Medical Internationalism. 
Today, there are 55,000 Cuban medical personnel in 67 different countries, responding to every kind of natural disaster and health crisis -- from earthquakes to Ebola. That is more than is provided by all G-7 "developed" countries. At home, Cuba provided free long-term care for 26,000 victims of the Chernobyl disaster, mainly children.

The Latin American School of Medicine. 
Originally established in 1999 to educate students from poor countries to become doctors, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called it "the most advanced medical school in the world." A Fidel Castro initiative following the destruction wrought on the region by Hurricanes Mitch and Georges, ELAM has graduated more than 25,000 doctors from 120 countries. Students' education is totally free; their only obligation is to return to their own countries and practise in under-served communities.

Operación Milagro, a program spearheaded by Cuba and Venezuela that has provided free medical treatment to more than three million people with eye problems in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa since 2004.

The struggle against apartheid. Although more controversial than Cuba's achievements in education and health care, Castro's decision to send troops to Angola in support of independence movements during wars of independence there in the 1970s and 1980s is widely seen as the beginning of the end of apartheid. By defeating the South African army, writes historian Piero Gleijeses, "Cuba changed the course of history in southern Africa." Or, as Nelson Mandela himself put it: "What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?"

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