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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.
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