People Before Profit blog

A grave injustice

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:02:00 +0000

On Sept. 23, some 700 people marched on the White House, demanding freedom for the so-called Cuban Five, and over the past few weeks, meetings have been held around the country with the same demand.

This seems to puzzle, and perhaps irritate, many Americans. As a neighbor of mine put it: “They were sent up to spy on our government, weren’t they? And weren’t they convicted of espionage? So how can anyone say they didn’t get what they deserved?”

But the answer is: No, they were not sent up to spy on our government. Rather, they were sent up in the early ’90s to penetrate, and provide information on, Cuban exile organizations suspected of terrorist activities against Cuba, organizations such as Brothers to the Rescue, Alpha 66, Omega 7 and others.

And no, they were not convicted of espionage. They were not even charged with espionage. The activities of the Five had to do with obtaining information on the activities or plans of private, nongovernmental groups, which is not a crime.

And so, to have something to charge them with, the federal government turned to “conspiracy to commit espionage.” In other words, it alleged, they had agreed among themselves that at some unspecified future time, they would spy on the U.S. government.

However, there was not a shred of evidence to back that up, nothing to indicate that was what they intended. But not to mind. The lack of evidence bothered the jury not at all.

Another common misconception is that whatever the Five were doing here, it must have been intended to do harm to the U.S.

But again, no, the intent was not to do any harm to the United States; rather, it was to gather information on the illegal activities of these exile organizations and then, since Cuba could not act on it, to provide that information to U.S. authorities. And this was done.

In the summer of 1998, the Cuban government invited representatives of the FBI to Cuba, where they were handed a memorandum documenting terrorist activities on the part of a number of Miami organizations and urged to take action against these violations of U.S. law.

But the FBI took no action at all against any exile organization. Rather, in the fall of 1998, it arrested the Cuban Five on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage — almost certainly because it suspected them of having provided the information in the memorandum. In short, the FBI moved not against the terrorists, but against their accusers!

The Five — Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labanino Salazar, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez — were put on trial in November 2000, convicted on June 8, 2001, and given sentences ranging from 15 years to two consecutive life terms.

Were the Five altogether guiltless? No. They were, admittedly, the unregistered agents of a foreign government, a transgression that might at most have resulted in a few years jail time — or less, given that they had provided to the U.S. information that could have been crucial, had the U.S. chosen to use it.

By all rights, they should have long since been released. Rather than that, they have now been in prison under difficult conditions for over eight years, and facing a lifetime more.

Perhaps the most unjust case of all is that of Hernandez, who had penetrated the Brothers to the Rescue organization and was charged with conspiring with members of the Cuban military to murder four members of that organization whose two planes were shot down in or near Cuban airspace in 1996. But the charge is utterly absurd.

Brothers to the Rescue had long been overflying Cuban territory. In January 1996, the Cuban government issued a public warning that if they came in again, they would be shot down. A diplomatic note was sent to the U.S. government, again demanding that it take measures to halt such flights. It did not. On Feb. 24, three Brothers to the Rescue aircraft, heading for Cuba, were warned by the Havana tower to turn back. They did not. Two planes were shot down, resulting in four deaths.

An overreaction on Cuba’s part, yes, with tragic consequences, but Hernandez had nothing to do with it. Indeed, that a jury could find them guilty of so phony a charge I would take as proof that these men could not possibly receive a fair trial in Miami.

Three judges of the Eleventh Circuit Court in Atlanta seemed to think so: In August 2005, they revoked the sentences and ordered a new trial in a location other than Miami.

But, in August 2006, after apparently having been prodded by higher authorities, the entire Eleventh Court rejected the three judges’ decision reversing the sentences, denied a new trial and ordered the case to be sent back to the panel for its consideration of remaining aspects. We will see what comes of that.

Meanwhile, a grave injustice has been done to the Five and the credibility of the U.S. system of justice has been tarnished. This is a wrong that must be corrected. Our honor demands it.

Wayne S. Smith is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (ciponline.org) and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.

He is former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1979-82). This article originally appeared in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and is reprinted by permission of the author.

CWA and Indian unions take on call centers

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 06:52:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) — The burgeoning thousands of call center workers in India who serve U.S. and multinational companies, and who got jobs formerly handled by U.S. unionists, are tough to organize. They need new types of unions to accomplish that goal, the Communications Workers and Indian unionists say.

In an Oct. 16 telephone press conference, three speakers calling from India — union leaders Ashim Roy and Vinod Shettee and Jobs With Justice organizer Anannya Bhattacharjee — described conditions, including huge amounts of pressure at work, in the call centers there. The conditions were also detailed in a joint CWA-Indian report.

“Most Indian employees have a six-day, 60-hour week, with 30 minutes each day for lunch and two breaks of 15 minutes each to go to the toilet,” said one of the two Indian union leaders. Many Indian call center workers are recent college graduates, or those who dropped out of school at age 20, drawn by relatively high salaries for younger workers — 15,000 rupees a month, or approximately $318.

“The work intensity is very high,” in Indian call centers, Bhattacharjee said. And overtime pay is infrequent, if paid at all, the union leaders said.

Shettee said his Young Professionals Collective started trying to organize the call center workers last year because a survey not only disclosed the work conditions but also showed “many were giving up their education” to join the call centers. But organizing quickly ran into problems, he admitted.

“The Young Professionals Collective did not start as a trade union because they (the workers) do not consider themselves to be part of the working class, and traditional trade unions were foreign to them,” Shettee explained. U.S. unions trying to organize professional workers — including CWA trying to organize white-collar workers at firms such as IBM — have hit the same attitudes here.

The YPC turned to other issues that could appeal to the call center workers as items that an organization, including unions, could deal with, notably stress on the job. “We organized them as a social collective,” Shettee said of the call center workers.

But the collective still faces other challenges. Indian call center workers work mostly at night. The collective’s organizers have to meet them early in the morning when their shifts end before they return home to sleep. Employers hamper things by erecting barracks for the call center workers, restricting organizers’ access.

For help, the collective turned to CWA, which worked on the report and the survey and is now sending activists to nations where call centers are being established to take advantage of lower-wage labor: India, the Philippines and Ireland.

“We cannot allow call center service, no matter where it’s done, to be dominated by low-road employers,” says CWA Vice President Annie Hill, a former call center worker herself. “Emphasizing customer service” and the fact that firms must pay higher wages, here and abroad, for good customer service “is the key,” she said.

U.S. blocks medical exchange with Cuba

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 05:45:00 +0000

It is commonly believed that the U.S. blockade against Cuba, in force for over four decades, is limited to politics and economics. Cooperation for people’s health is allowed, right?

Wrong. For the second year in a row, the U.S. State Department denied Cuba’s minister of health a visa to attend the 47th meeting of the Directing Council of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), Sept. 25-29 in Washington.

PAHO, founded in 1902 and headquartered in the U.S. capital, is the World Health Organization’s regional office for the Americas. Cuba, a founding member, is one of nine nations serving on its executive committee. But this year Jose Ramon Balaguer Cabrera, Cuba’s highest health official, was once again denied permission to attend.

On the committee’s agenda was approval of a “statement of intent” under which “the governments reiterate their commitment to the vision of a region that is healthier, more equitable in regard to health.” Item 11 of the statement reads: “The countries of the Americas seek to eliminate avoidable unjust and remediable health inequalities.”

Appearing on Cuba’s behalf before the Directing Council, Dagoberto Rodríguez, head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, seemed to suggest that participation by Balaguer might have cleared up ambiguities in the declaration.

According to Rodríguez, Balaguer would have told PAHO representatives that 30,000 Cubans, mostly physicians, are providing health care to people in 68 countries, that 20,000 health workers are being trained in Cuba, and that 350,000 Latin Americans received free sight-restoring eye operations a year. His point would have been that “health inequalities” are “avoidable” — all of them — and as such, could be eliminated.

Rodríguez asserted, “The North American government is mistaken in presuming to silence Cuba’s voice, to block efforts of my country to extend international medical cooperation.” Calling Balaguer’s exclusion a “monstrous joke,” he urged PAHO to publicly condemn the U.S. action and to change its venue for future meetings.

U.S. restrictions on the exchange of health care and scientific information run both ways. Last March, Washington prevented 100 U.S. scientists, therapists, surgeons and physicians from attending the Fourth International Conference on Coma and Death held in Havana. They included Kenneth Gross, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Miami, who, writing recently in the Washington Times, notes the rarity of international, multidisciplinary symposia on brain functioning. He recalls one being held in 2000 and none having been hosted in the United States.

Desperate to find information helpful in the treatment of an 18-year-old comatose university student in Miami, Gross searched the Internet in vain for material from the Havana meeting. His patient, Michi Padrón, died Sept. 6.

Gross points out that the “almighty dollar” occasionally has worked to break the health care blockade, but that collaborative treatment projects for difficult problems like coma fall into a different category. “Although drugs do exist for coma, there’s no global campaign, because these drugs ... don’t contribute to the lucrative profits sought by the drug companies.”

The company YM BioSciences may have such a drug. On Sept. 25 the Treasury Department approved company plans to import the Cuban drug Nimotuzumab. Targeted for inoperable pediatric brain tumors, this is the first Cuban anti-cancer drug allowed into the United States for clinical trials.

Gross says he favors opening up an “interchange that includes scientific, academic and medical dialogue with Cuba.” He says he is unaware that the corpus callosum, a structure connecting the right and left sides of the brain, is a “bridge only for those who vote capitalist.” He would build a “bridge for Michi” to join the two countries. He notes the tragic irony that Michi, dead after prolonged coma, was of Cuban heritage.

atwhit@megalink.net

Fighting to close the torture college

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 08:14:00 +0000

The School of the Americas (SOA) is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers, located in Fort Benning, Ga. It has trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers since 1946. After the Pentagon was forced to acknowledge the use of torture manuals discovered at the school, it was closed down, but almost immediately reopened under a new name: Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The SOA has been popularly dubbed “the School of Assassins.”

After learning that graduates of the School of the Americas were responsible for the rape and murder of his fellow Maryknoll Missioners in El Salvador, Maryknoll priest Father Roy Bourgeois began to investigate and protest the existence of the school with a small group of activists called School of the Americas Watch. Since 1990, this movement has grown to tens of thousands, and last year 19,000 people from around the country held a vigil at the gates of Fort Benning calling for its closing.

A nonviolent grassroots movement that seeks to stand in solidarity with the people of Latin America, SOA Watch has had over 200 of its members spend time in jail for acts of civil disobedience.

In 2004, Father Bourgeois met with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez to request that Venezuela consider withdrawing its troops from the SOA, where 4,000 Venezuelan soldiers had trained. Chávez agreed to this request, and Venezuelan troops were immediately withdrawn. This successful encounter led to the “Latin America initiative” of SOA Watch, which requests the withdrawal of troops from SOA.

In March, a delegation of SOAW activists traveled to Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia where they were able to affirm the immediate withdrawal of Argentine and Uruguayan troops and the gradual withdrawal of Bolivian troops.

In August and September, SOAW sent another delegation to Ecuador, Peru and Chile. Human rights activist Lisa Sullivan was a member of this delegation.

Many years ago, I stood in a cemetery in Santiago, Chile, as the fall leaves swirled in the wind. I had traveled — thousands of miles — to this immense burial ground, where I furtively made my way to the back lot. Oddly, it was the most beautiful spot I had found in this city.

Acquaintances had whispered to me where I would find what I was looking for. I scanned the large gray wall of niches until I spotted what I sought, and slowly approached and read: Victor Jara, 1932-1973. I looked over my shoulder before scrawling something next to hundreds of other words, some of them whitewashed over. This was 1980. The dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet stood firmly, and the country was ruled by fear.

As I looked up at the tomb of this gentle singer/songwriter who had been tortured and murdered in the first days following a bloody coup, one of his songs floated through my head:

Fragile as a kite, on the rooftops of Barrancas

Plays the child, Luchin, with his purple hands ...

If there are children like Luchin, who eat dirt and worms

Let us open all the cages so that they may fly like birds.

My mind burned with a question: how could someone who sang with such tenderness about a child as fragile as a kite be beaten brutally until his bones broke? How could someone whose plea was that we free children from the cage of poverty have his body pumped with 36 bullets? No one is born capable of unleashing such inhumanity; where could this be learned?

Twenty-six years later, I discovered the answer to this question: at the School of the Americas. Former Chilean military officer Edwin Dimter Bianchi, now an anonymous bureaucrat working in Chile’s Pensions and Audit Department, was recently identified as Jara’s killer.

Those who were present at the stadium where Jara and thousands of others were held in the days following the coup that toppled elected President Salvador Allende identified Dimter. A graduate of the SOA course in “Combat Arms Orientation,” Dimter, along with dozens of other Chilean graduates, returned to his country to participate in a bloody rampage that exterminated over 3,000 lives in order to impose and maintain one of the longest and most repressive dictatorships of the Americas.

Though Pinochet was not an SOA graduate, many of his closest aides — including key leaders of the intelligence agency that was responsible for the vast majority of the disappearances and murders, the DINA — were SOA graduates. For many years, Pinochet’s sword adorned the wall of the commander of this institution that had taught such inhumanity.

Just recently, on an early spring morning in the Southern Hemisphere, I returned to the cemetery in Santiago along with SOAW delegates Roy Bourgeois, Linda Panetta and Carlos Mauricio.

This time there was no need to search discretely. Free maps of the cemetery highlighted Jara’s tomb, a small but significant symbol of change in the now democratic Chile. The entrance to the cemetery held a new and imposing granite stone, engraved with the names of the thousands of victims of the dictatorship. Below the names, water collected from all of Chile’s lakes and rivers flowed over stones brought from the seas where many of the bodies were thrown from planes, in a pulsating rhythm that seemed to say, “Nunca más,” “never again.”

Realizing ‘never again’

It was that hope of “never again” that had brought us to Chile. Recognizing that Chile was in a process of healing from years of military abuses, we had come to ask that the government stop sending troops to the SOA. The thinking behind this new “Latin American strategy” was simple: if there were no more students, there would be no more school.

On previous trips to Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, we received the good news from leaders that they would withdraw their troops from the SOA, some immediately and some gradually. [See “South America turning against School of the Americas,” PWW 4/15/2006.] This time our travels brought us to Ecuador, Peru and Chile.

Given the large numbers of Chilean students at the SOA, our visit to Chile was key. Only Colombia has sent more students to the school in the past decade. We had hopes of meeting with Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet. Her own father, a general who had opposed Pinochet, was an indirect victim of the SOA, having died after mistreatment in prisons overseen by SOA graduates. But as former defense minister, Bachelet had continued to send large numbers of army officers to train at the SOA.

President Bachelet responded to our request with a letter affirming that the SOA was indeed an important issue, and that she had asked her defense minister to meet with us to discuss it.

A plea for the children

From the start of our meeting, Defense Minister Vivianne Blanlot openly acknowledged the terrible abuses unleashed by graduates of the SOA. We presented our own concerns and request that Chile withdraw its troops from this school. Chilean Pablo Ruiz asked if he could say a word “as a former political prisoner and torture victim.” This plea, he said, was not made in the name of healing abuses of the past. It was a plea in the name of his children, of all of Chile’s children, that they may never experience a repeat of this tragic history.

He reminded the minister that during the Allende government, many key military officers trained at the SOA, to later return and participate in his bloody overthrow. As long as Chile continues to train troops at this school, what guarantee is there that history will not repeat itself? After a moment of thoughtful silence, the minister stated that she would take the step of recommending to the army that they refrain from sending more officers to this school.

We were quite pleased with the results of this meeting, but many of the Chilean human rights activists were less enthusiastic. It had not been public information that Chile continues to send officers to the SOA. Only after being asked by a Chilean newspaper, as a result of our visit, did the Defense Department acknowledge that 170 officers were scheduled to attend the SOA this year. This information created a sense of outrage.

Also, the minister made it clear that while she would strongly “recommend” to the army that they stop sending officers to train at the SOA, she was not in a position to “impose” such a decision. This highlighted a growing concern that much more must be done to assure that the Chilean military be held responsible to the civilian government rather than vice versa.

Meeting with Chileans

We participated in numerous meetings, forums and media events, where we found tremendous interest in the SOA and support for withdrawal of Chilean troops. Students, teachers, ex-political prisoners, lay leaders, sisters, priests and activists were committed to educating the public about the issue and pressuring their government to withdraw. A consortium of human rights organizations placed the withdrawal of Chilean troops from the SOA as top priority for their bicentennial agenda. A dozen groups committed enthusiastically to organizing a vigil on Nov. 19, the day SOAW will be protesting at Fort Benning.

Several Chilean congressmen, including Tucapel Jimenez, whose father was a labor leader killed by an SOA graduate, decided to draft legislation to demand the withdrawal of Chilean troops from the SOA.

Ecuador and Peru

Our visits to Ecuador and Peru were similar. In all three countries we were able to meet with high-level government officials, where we received serious attention and obtained commitments to reconsider their participation in the SOA.

In Ecuador, with elections right around the corner, we decided to share our concerns with all the presidential candidates as well, and personally met with the leading candidate of the moment, León Roldós, who agreed to support withdrawal of Ecuadorian troops as part of his platform.

Thanks to ample media attention, the SOA was catapulted into the public eye and public debate took place. We shared our concerns about the SOA in dozens of forums and meetings organized by local organizations.

Perhaps what is most important of all, in each of these three countries, key organizations and individuals stepped forward to seriously commit to efforts to pressure their governments to withdraw their country’s troops from the SOA and to participate in the larger effort to close this school forever.

Not just in Fort Benning

We were also reminded by many of our counterparts in these countries that the interests represented by the SOA and the tactics taught at that school are not limited to the halls of Fort Benning. More and more there is concern that as the spotlight shines ever brighter on the SOA, the Pentagon is moving its instructors, tactics and techniques to hidden and not-so-hidden places in Latin American countries. We heard this in Bolivia during our previous trip, and in Ecuador this concern was expressed regarding the U.S. military base in Manta, Ecuador.

Next year, a continent-wide meeting will be held to strategize around opposition to this and other U.S. military bases. Local organizations strongly requested the support of the SOAW movement at the conference.

In Peru, we found even more concern about the presence of 1,031 U.S. military personnel from the Southern Command in Lambayeque, in northern Peru. Called Nuevo Horizonte and billed as a “civic humanitarian” mission, the initiative involves training Peruvian troops as well. Local newspapers carried articles about the military mission with such intriguing titles as “The Savior Who Came From the Skies,” in reference to one of the women helicopter pilots who “became an angel for the poor of Lambayeque.”

What they forgot to report was that these “angels” are bringing with them hundreds of arms and munitions as well. We received a list, straight from the website of the Peruvian Congress, of the exact guns they are bringing. When a Peruvian congresswoman took us to meet with the prime minister to share our mutual concerns about the SOA, the congresswoman addressed this issue as well, seeing it as a different chapter in the same book. She and others promised to rally support for withdrawing Peruvian troops from the SOA and asked if we would be there for them in opposing this new disguised version of the SOA on their own soil.

No shortcuts

When people ask how such a growing movement came to be, Father Bourgeois always says, “There are no shortcuts.” All of our efforts are necessary to close this school of assassins and to make sure that no new schools appear in different forms. Together, from east to west and north to south of our Americas, we must continue to join hands so that there will be no old or new schools that somehow motivate soldiers to silence the voice of a poet in the name of freedom.

Victor Jara’s voice was never silenced. We met with his widow on a rainy morning in Santiago. We cried as she showed us a video of Victor, and she cried as we showed her a video of the SOA, and asked what she could do to close this school. When I pointed out to her my delight in finding the words to “Luchin” on her wall, she said what a shame it was that many of Victor’s words such as these were still so pertinent. Such as these, which were sung by thousands on the day that the stadium where Col. Dimter broke Victor’s hands was renamed “Estadio Victor Jara”:

Listen to our song

it is fire of pure love

dove and dove’s nest,

leaves of an olive branch,

it is the universal song,

a cry which will bring to

triumph

the right to live in peace

Lisa Sullivan is a human rights activist and former Maryknoll lay missioner. She has worked in Latin America for over 20 years.

Bushs reckless, imperial foreign policy

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 06:40:00 +0000

A March 2006 Council on Foreign Relations task force report on Russia, co-chaired by Jack Kemp and John Edwards, recommended the United States adopt a Cold War approach toward Russia. According to the task force, Russian President Putin has taken his country in the “wrong direction.” As a result, the task force recommended that U.S. policy toward Russia should aim at “containment” through military encirclement and a more active role in Russia’s internal affairs.

Edwards and Kemp’s task force was no doubt responding to Russian efforts to promote greater cooperation among its neighbors in the economic and security spheres — similar to U.S. initiatives, like NAFTA and CAFTA, which provide a forum for the U.S., Mexico, Central America nations and Canada to coordinate their trade and investment policies.

Rather than embrace such initiatives as the “Eurasian Economic Community,” which promotes economic cooperation and the development of its member countries (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with Armenia and Ukraine as observers), the United States, a non-Central-Asian country, is trying to cobble together an alternative, “The Great Central Asia Policy.” The project is unlikely to get off the ground because its pivot is Afghanistan, which according to NATO’s top commander in Kabul is at a tipping point, with insurgent Taliban fighters gathering the allegiance of Afghans (Daily Kos 10/8/06).

In addition, the U.S.-backed “Great Central Asia Policy,” unlike Russia, has no significant source of water to draw on for irrigation.

In an article in The Nation, Stephen F. Cohen suggests that the Cold War never actually ended, for the U.S. NATO’s military reach kept on expanding, eventually reaching the borders of a much diminished Russia. In addition, the U.S. acquired a nuclear superiority it could not achieve during the Soviet era.

It is significant that during the Putin era, sobriety returned to the Kremlin, just at the time that U.S. leaders were becoming drunk with power, drafting delusional projects for a New American Century. In response, Russia, together with China, began to draft a strategic program based on the maintenance of a multipolar world, consisting of a Eurasian Military Alliance and a Eurasian Energy Club, which, to be successful, needs Iran as a functioning member, as well as other regional forums, like the Collective Security Treaty Association and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The Bush administration sees the formation of this bloc as a threat to its sole superpower status, which is a primary reason it ordered the Eisenhower Strike Group with its awesome military capability to the Persian Gulf. Col. Sam Gardiner, a former military strategy instructor at the National War College, is quoted in The Nation: “I think the plan’s been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran.” He thinks it is also a “terrible idea,” triggering many unpredictable consequences.

Bush’s foreign policy reflects the most aggressive circles who openly support U.S. imperial rule over the entire world. The goal is to enforce the domination of multinational corporations in every aspect of human life, with a privileged position for U.S. capital. Many of the administration’s critics share Bush’s goal, but favor a less reckless approach to achieving it. Such a policy is still against the interests of working people in the U.S., as well as the rest of the world.

Nonetheless, we should welcome any development that restrains this administration’s insane drive to war, whether it is in Iran, Korea or Latin America. It is encouraging that a growing number of active and retired military leaders, like Gardner, are working to keep closed the gates to Hell.

U.S. blocks medical exchange with Cuba

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:39:00 +0000

It is commonly believed that the U.S. blockade against Cuba, in force for over four decades, is limited to politics and economics. Cooperation for people's health is allowed, right?

Wrong: For the second year in a row, the U.S. State Department denied Cuba's minister of health a visa to attend the 47th meeting of the Directing Council of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) Sept. 25-29 in Washington.

PAHO, founded in 1902 and headquartered in the U.S. capital, is the World Health Organization’s regional office for the Americas. Cuba, a founding member, is one of nine nations serving on its executive committee. But this year Jose Ramon Balaguer Cabrera, Cuba’s highest health official, was once again denied permission to attend.

On the committee's agenda was approval of a 'statement of intent' under which 'the governments reiterate their commitment to the vision of a region that is healthier, more equitable in regard to health.' Item 11 of the statement reads: 'The countries of the Americas seek to eliminate avoidable unjust and remediable health inequalities.'

Appearing on Cuba's behalf before the Directing Council, Dagoberto Rodríguez, head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, seemed to suggest that participation by Balaguer might have cleared up ambiguities in the later declaration.

According to Rodríguez, Balaguer would have told PAHO representatives that 30,000 Cubans, mostly physicians, are providing health care to people in 68 countries, that 20,000 health workers are being trained in Cuba, and that 350,000 Latin Americans received free sight-restoring eye operations a year. His point would have been that 'health inequalities' are 'avoidable' — all of them — and as such, could be eliminated.

Rodríguez asserted, 'The North American government is mistaken in presuming to silence Cuba's voice, to block efforts of my country to extend international medical cooperation.' Calling Balaguer's exclusion a 'monstrous joke,' he urged PAHO to publicly condemn the U.S. action and to change its venue for future meetings.

U.S. restrictions on the exchange of health care and scientific information run both ways. Last March, Washington prevented 100 U.S. scientists, therapists, surgeons, and physicians from attending the Fourth International Conference on Coma and Death held in Havana. They included Kenneth Gross, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Miami, who, writing in a recent Washington Times, notes the rarity of international, multidisciplinary symposia on brain functioning. He recalls one being held in 2000 and none having been hosted in the United States.

Desperate to find information helpful in the treatment of an 18-year-old comatose university student in Miami, Gross searched the Internet in vain for material from the Havana meeting. His patient, Michi Padrón, died Sept. 6.

Gross points out that the 'almighty dollar' occasionally has worked to break the health care blockade, but that collaborative treatment projects for difficult problems like coma fall into a different category. 'Although drugs do exist for coma, there's no global campaign, because these drugs ... don't contribute to the lucrative profits sought by the drug companies.'

The company YM BioSciences may have such a drug. On Sept. 25 the Treasury Department approved company plans to import the Cuban drug Nimotuzumab. Targeted for inoperable pediatric brain tumors, this is the first Cuban anti-cancer drug allowed into the United States for clinical trials.

Gross says he favors opening up an 'interchange that includes scientific, academic, and medical dialogue with Cuba.' He says he is unaware that the corpus callosum, a structure connecting the right and left sides of the brain, is a 'bridge only for those who vote capitalist.' He would build a 'bridge for Michi' to join the two countries. He noted the tragic irony that Michi, dead after prolonged coma, was of Cuban heritage.