The director general of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), Didacus Jules, from Saint Lucia, on Thursday rejected pressures by the United States against Cuba's medical cooperation.
In statements to Choice TV, Jules referred to the draft bill introduced by US senators to sanction countries that benefit from Cuba's medical cooperation.
Those actions only benefit US interests and have nothing to do with the history of cooperation and solidarity of the Eastern Caribbean with Cuba, he underlined.
The OECS and its member States will deal with that alleged new 'black list' by the US Government, as they have done on previous occasions, Jules pointed out.
It is not fair to threat that way a country like Cuba, which has consistently maintained its medical assistance to other countries and, on this occasion, it only tries to contribute with its medical assistance to confront the Covid-19 pandemic, he stressed.
Jules repeated that the Organization, and its members, will make diplomatic efforts and have already given clear instructions to their ambassadors in the United States to explain their stance on those punitive measures to their counterparts in that country.
He added that relations of medical cooperation with Cuba are not only kept by the countries of the Organization, but also by the members of CARICOM, and that relationship is more than 40 years old.
In that regard, he recalled Operation Miracle, created by leaders Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, as a result of which more than 23,000 eye surgeries were performed on patients from the Eastern Caribbean.
He added that Cuba's solidarity in the fight against Ebola in Africa has to be acknowledged worldwide.
Jules recalled that 50 OECS experts were trained to treat Ebola patients at the Pedro Kouri Tropical Medicine Institute in Cuba.
Likewise, he highlighted Cuba's contribution to the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic with 34 brigades of the Henry Reeve Contingent, made up of more than 3,000 health experts in 28 countries, including most member States in the region, in addition to more than 28,000 Cuban medical professionals who had worked in 59 countries before the Covid-19 outbreak.
(Cubaminrex | Prensa Latina)