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The first news on the case I read reached us
through the Italian news agency ANSA, on April
22.
According to the article (dated April
22, La Paz), a Commission of Deputies was to
investigate the case of a female Bolivian
boarder student who died in Cuba, whose body was
repatriated with several vital organs, including
the brain, missing.
The President of the Parliament's
Commission on Social Policy Guillermo Mendoza
announced that he would ask the Chancery for all
the case records, according to the Catholic news
agency Fides.
According to the same report, the
relatives of Beatriz Porco Calle, who resided in
Cuba as a boarding student, filed charges
claiming Cuban embassy officials had delivered
her body without eyes, the tongue, teeth and
other vital organs, including the brain, without
offering any explanation whatsoever.
Deputy Mendoza, the article adds, said
he would exhaustively review Cuban legislation
on organ transplants and the commitments
Bolivian boarders assume in writing before
travelling to Cuba.
Spain's EFE reports similar news,
adding that the family of the young woman had
requested compensation from the Cuban embassy in
Bolivia and, when this was denied, had
threatened to go to the press.
The Bolivian foreign minister, the
article concluded, opined that her parents had
gone too far in demanding compensation,
affirming that the government had acted in a
humanitarian fashion in this case.
Anyone who observes what goes on around
the world needs little else. Everything
surrounding what occurred could be deduced.
Nevertheless, I inquired about the
case's formalities, requested details and
precise information to be able to respond to
these claims of an alleged and inhuman
divesting
of a body. In addition to this, I requested
precise reports, with exact figures, on our
medical cooperation efforts in Bolivia, a
country in our continent that the empire seeks
to destroy.
Since Evo Morales, a native through and
through, was elected President of long-suffering
Bolivia, we offered him support in the areas of
healthcare and education. I recall that
afternoon vividly. We were convinced that, each
year, we could save many thousands of lives and
give back an incalculable number of people their
sight and full health at no cost for the nation.
An intensive and proven comprehensive literacy
program was to be implemented immediately, in
several languages, including the most
widely-spoken: Spanish.
In Bolivia, 119 Cuban educators work to
apply their experience and knowledge, with the
aim of declaring the nation, in only two and a
half years, an illiteracy-free country. From the
very beginning, our country provided Bolivia
with the teaching materials needed to take on
this challenge: 30,000 21-inch television sets
imported from China, the same number of VCRs,
with 16,459 transformers and 2,000 photovoltaic
systems (which make up an entire network used
for follow-up courses taught during the day),
1,359,000 primers in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara,
reading pamphlets and other materials I shall
not mention so as to not make the list
interminable. A part of our war reserve of solar
panels was sent to Bolivia. During Evo’s visit
to our country a few weeks after his electoral
victory, Cuba officially offered him the free
transportation of these materials to Bolivia.
Venezuela, a country which had just
been declared illiteracy-free following the
implementation of the "Yes I Can” method, joined
the program.
A total of 23,727 teaching locales were
created in Bolivia. Since then, 76.6 percent of
the country’s illiterate population has joined
the program and 62 percent of those who did not
learn to read or write in primary school have
already done so, and not one person has paid a
cent.
It is in the field of healthcare,
however, where the most intense cooperative
efforts have been undertaken in the country;
there where Che and his Cuban and Latin American
comrades and a young German internationalist
perished. In this field, no country in the world
today, and perhaps this will be true for a long
time, can compete with Cuba. It is a form of
free cooperation engaging the poorest nations
which is, at the same time, a means of exporting
services to countries around the world that have
many more resources available. In Latin America
and the Caribbean, particularly, we have offered
these free cooperative services to the neediest
countries.
A total of 1,852 Cubans arduously work
in Bolivia. Of them, 1,226 are doctors, 250
specialized nurses, 119 healthcare technicians,
9 dentists, 86 professionals and technicians
working in other fields and 102 selected
individuals committed to offering vital services
of different sorts, required by the Cuban
brigades and their hospitalized patients there.
Cuba's medical brigade is working in
215 municipalities of Bolivia's 9 departments,
treating people of modest means and anyone who
request their services. They have the best
equipment, donated by our country, at their
disposal. In 18 ophthalmologic surgery
positions, 186,508 patients have been operated
on. Well over 130,000 patients can be operated
on a year.
Our doctors have treated in their
outpatient cabinets nearly 12,000,000 patients
since the first arrived in Bolivia. The number
of lives saved can only be determined through
calculations for, as a rule, these patients did
not receive any kind of attention prior to their
arrival.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of
our medical cooperation efforts is the training
of 5,291 young Bolivians who currently study
medicine in Cuba, 621 of them at the Latin
American School of Medicine, which has seen
three graduations with excellent results, and
4,670 in the new program. I am not exaggerating
when I say that the relatives of the young
people who study this specialty in our country
are the firmest and most combative friends of
Cuba in Latin America, including, of course,
Bolivia.
The 22-year-old student Beatriz Porco
Calle the cable refers to held passport number
5968246. She was from the department of Oruro,
Samara province, in the Curahuara de Carangas
municipality, a rural community in Toypicollana.
She was a native and an Adventist Christian. She
was faring satisfactorily in her second year of
medical studies, at the Miguel Sandarán Corzo
School of Medicine in Matanzas.
On March 6, she suddenly lost
consciousness in her dorm's bathroom. The
doctors and teachers decided to take her
immediately to the provincial hospital. The
physical examination did not reveal anything
that could explain the causes of this, nor did
the laboratory and other tests, including a
computerized axial tomography. She had a good
recovery and was discharged. She experienced
headaches and bouts of dizziness a short time
later. New medical exams were conducted. She
felt stressed. She was administered the
medication used for such conditions. On March
23, at 7:30 p.m., she again lost consciousness.
She was once again taken to the emergency ward
by a professor, then to intensive care, where,
prior to her death, she was diagnosed with what
is known as brain death.
Bolivia’s Foreign Ministry and
ambassador were contacted. They prepared the
documentation needed to transport the body,
which travelled nearly one week later, on the 28th.
The body was taken to the National
Legal Medicine Institute, which is bound by law
to conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of
death. The relevant formalities were rigorously
observed. The student’s boyfriend and other
classmates collected her belongings and sealed
her suitcases. At the school, a mass was held on
March 31. The Institute's diagnosis and I quote,
was the following: "Death due to endocranial
hypertension, hemorrhagic brain-vascular disease
caused by a congenital cerebellous meningeal
vascular malformation". In this case, the
extraction of the visceral block and the taking
of pertinent samples proved unavoidable.
A teacher from the medical school
accompanied the body to Bolivia and delivered it
to her relatives. Cuba’s medical mission assumed
the costs of transportation to her place of
origin and funeral expenses.
It is hard for me to write about this,
but it is even harder to read cables, carrying
around the world the image of a body divested of
its organs, cables which oblige Cuba to offer
this kind of explanation.
What has is occurred is crystal clear.
The empire needs to besmirch the truths about
Cuba it cannot tolerate. It instigates and
encourages relatives to demand compensation.
They foster such action, as we can see in one of
the cables, and disseminate across the world the
repugnant lie through a member of parliament and
the Fides news agency. Then, it sets its
devastating media machinery in motion.
In our country —I do not hesitate to
say this— there are insensitive people, knowing
very little about what goes on around them, who
quickly and mindlessly say that "we should not
help Bolivia”. They will never understand that,
both in politics and in the revolution, the
alternative to a mistaken or misguided strategy
is defeat.
Fidel Castro Ruz
April 24, 2008
7:15 p.m. |
