To the Cuban doctors
• With admiration, profound love and respect for the Cuban doctors
and all those others who still carry and maintain the code of honor of serving others. It is the true gain that can never be devalued

DANNY RIVERA (*)

CUBAN doctors and their humanitarian work in Haiti have demonstrated to the world a worthy example of fraternal dedication, humane generosity, elevated professionalism, skilled medical experience, and pure love for other people, and action that should be admired and broadcast by all the media outlets on the planet. Although, of course, it’s more important for these doctors that every human being that they treat feels grateful; that is their reward.

The donated service that these medical angels are offering the Haitian people and which the international media is trying to hide, has so much spiritual and humane dignity that it cannot remain hidden behind the avarice and morbid egotism of the international corporations or the media networks that are serving this evil policy. The smile of a child, a thankful mother, a tormented people that knows that a sincere friend is extending an open hand, is like a humane sun that comes to their aid with the energy of true sentiments of love and respect. This act exceeds any torpedoing of indifference on the part of the media, because their action of purity is over and above evil and demolishes it with the highly powerful charge of love that it bears and the joy and gratefulness of those who receive it.

The Haitians see, with deeds to prove it, how the Cuban doctors arrived to treat them and rescue them from the calamities that they are suffering, without weapons to kill but with instruments of fraternal love and sufficient knowledge to restore to them the faith, smiles, and hope in that the brigade of doctors came to cure their physical and spiritual wounds. The impressive work of the Cuban doctors in Haiti has been carried out for decades in that country and throughout the world, wherever it is requested. This priesthood of medicine re-vindicates the medical profession which, these days, is practiced solely for economic gain, supplanting a service for a medical business in which patients are treated as figures and numbers, thus usurping the essence of service for which the medical profession exists and what it should offer.

With these heroic gestures on the part of Cuban doctors, they are saving and elevating their profession to the pedestal of a truly Christian service and, at the same time, their accomplishments of love highlight the false humanism of those who arrived in Haiti with arms and tanks, as if the Haitian people had declared war on them. Looking at scenes of the arrival of marines armed to the teeth with the arsenal of the U.S. military, coming to a country destroyed by an earthquake with a military approach, and seeing blue UN helmets charging the disorientated population only seeking support, aid, and comprehension, is in contrast to the agenda of immediate unhesitating action of Venezuelan, Chilean, Cuban, Nicaraguan and other rescue workers to work to save lives. These scenes are very confusing; where is the love and the mental and persuasive strength to dare to confront the people with the skills of mental power, the spirit of love, and relevant and convincing words to control a population that is suffering and living in this state of shock after being stripped of everything and enveloped in misery? Of course they are despairing, but nothing will be solved with weapons; nobody will recover or be convinced that the military arrived in this devastated territory with honest, good and humanitarian intentions.

The sincere hands of friends, of Cuban doctors and physicians from other countries who arrived the day after the disaster and who, shoulder to shoulder, without any desire for a leading role, have given services to fellow human beings. These doctors will receive many generations of humane love because, as the phrase goes, love is paid with love.

Poor are those who with their military "goodness" want and seek to be recognized. They will be repaid in the manner and form in which they gave it. How good it is that the forgotten and rejected by the corrupt media – in favor of ignoble interests – are remembered: the Cuban doctors and the others from different nations who came together with the shared intention of putting into practice the sacred love for others, as protagonists of an epic of world medicine unprecedented in human history. We will remember them as the extension and the science of the power of generous love; physicians who represent humanist science in the service of the displaced and poor of the earth; they are practicing the Christian verse that the last shall be the first.

(*) This text was sent to Granma by the famous Puerto Rican singer together with a recording of a song that he recently composed in dedication to the Haitian people.