How many doctors are there in Cuba per head of population?
One doctor per 164 inhabitants.It used to be 1 per 168 but it has come down. We live as a poor nation but we die as a rich one. What kind of effect does the US blockade still have on Cuba? The US is isolating Cuba, and that is very costly for the country. For example, my hospital, the William Soler Children’s Hospital in Havana, has 400 beds but it has only one X-ray machine, and that is more than 40 years old. Are you short of medicines? Thanks to European solidarity, there’s a project in Europe called MediCuba in which they buy raw materials and send it to Cuba. We manufacture the medicines, and they are sold at the price it costs to manufacture them. So that organisation skirts the blockade, and it also encourages Cuba to promote its own pharmaceutical industry. We don’t get all the materials we need, but it has been an important help. We buy other raw materials with funds from tourism. Sometimes we have to use intermediaries because if the US detects who has been selling the raw ma
