03-24-06,9:51am
Shop stands are there, with designer eyeglasses of all kinds, and mannequins are so perfect that anyone might momentarily think they were human beings trapped inside. There the salesmen show —and sell— the most unimaginable goods and gadgets; from imported cloth of the highest quality to state-of-the-art home electronics.
This is Islamabad’s Blue Area, a central commercial facility where, if it were not for beggars waiting along the sidewalks, one could imagine it to be an almost perfect society.
But like other places in the world —outside the shop windows and luxurious buildings which announce themselves with grand billboards and webs of telephone cables— there is another city in which the focus is on survival. It doesn’t appear in the major media; the people there are barely allowed the right to dream. They are the poor.
This shocking contrast, so painful for Cuban volunteers who are lending their fraternal support in Pakistan as medical staff, is a source of constant reflection.
Today, Cuba remains in their hearts for many reasons, but mostly because of the sense of humanity and social justice which that society defends.
From Delta Amacuro to Abbottabad
Manuel Alejandro del Valle came to know Delta Amacuro, a Venezuelan state in which mainly by indigenous people live. He is a doctor and worked in that area as a coordinator for the Barrio Adentro community-medical program for a year – enough time to be impacted for a lifetime by the extreme poverty in that place.
In Delta, he had his first encounter with effects of capitalism, “an agonizing regime” he now calls it. For three months in Pakistan, in Abbottabad City, some two and a half hours from the capital, he has worked in a field hospital where he has learned that the people there share common characteristics: poverty and unhappiness.
“We found here schools that had been destroyed” —said the young doctor from Cuba’s Camaguey province— “and not because of the earthquake, but because of abandonment, since there is not an infrastructure for seeing to such needs.”
“One day I had the opportunity to visit the Ayub Medical Complex, located very near where we are now. There, people are prone to very high levels of nervous tension. Medical attention is free of charge, but people have to pay for medicine and diagnosis kits. Therefore, patients see themselves as being unable to receive full treatment.
“In this region there were only four public schools, but they have now all been destroyed; they are without windows and doors, and there are not enough chairs for everyone. The children wear dirty clothes and their shoes are in bad shape. However it’s a completely different situation with the twelve private schools in the area; class difference is tremendous.”
“I see these things and I think about Cuba, this is inevitable, he said. In our country, this situation did not happen; not even in the Special Period did a single school shut down Currently all of them have TV monitors, PC’s, VCRS – even if it’s for one sole child in an isolated mountain area. The Revolution is present in every corner of the island, the Revolution is everywhere.
“Now, in Pakistan, we are far away from Delta Amacuro, more than a whole day’s flight. Nonetheless, one finds the same problems. Capitalism causes poverty, hunger, and inequity. The difference is that Venezuela government, with Chavez as a leader with a political and human will, decided to change such a sad situation.
“It’s not like that here in Pakistan. What is important is profit, so what does it matter if the poor are fed, educated or have access to health care?” said del Valle.
If you are wealthy you are taken into consideration, but if not…
Nurse Leonidas Diaz will never forget the school located in Abbottabad’s central area, fully destroyed by the earthquake on October 8. She had arrived to Pakistan just a few days ago and couldn’t stop thinking about Cuba, where the care and preservation of school facilities takes a top priority.
Nurse Diaz has a five-year-old girl, Tamara. She was thinking about her child; as she looked around she could see the sad faces of the girls there, none of them could be compared with Tamara’s happy face.
“Seeing things that younger children enjoy in Cuba, one is struck even more with how much they suffer here,” said the nurse. “I feel such sorrow seeing this poverty and misery. Sometimes, because of their sizes, we suppose these kids are four or five years old, but they are really much older – they suffer from malnutrition,” she noted.
“In Pakistan, we have found the face of capitalism,” she said, “We have never seen it close up. It is the face of inequality, where the poor do not have access to free health care, where women are not medicated before or after labor, where mass poverty is a kind of umbilical cord that binds the great masses.”
Arlenis Barroso’s had a similar point of view. She, a recent medical school graduate, said, “Though cinema and literature show the social system and its consequences, I didn’t imagine it like this – so brutal and inhumane; where there is no mercy. Money is what counts; it is what opens the door and horizons for you.”
“In the hospital where I work, serious cases have arrived but they’re beyond hope; they just come too late. They do not have economic resources and wait to the last moment. For example, tuberculosis is a health problem, but it is merely taken into consideration. There’s not a program designed to prevent it, maybe there are token efforts, but they’re just that.”
“I witnessed what would be an unthinkably gloomy scene to us Cubans. One day, while visiting patients in Nawan Shert, a neighborhood located in the outskirts of Abbottabad, I saw a six years old girl carrying a flour sack on her little back. She was hauling it from a sweet shop. When I asked the two Pakistani translators who were with us, they told me that it was surely the only way her family could survive.
“The scene was painful, a faithful inheritance of a social system where the human being is not the most important. It is a regime that focuses on people who have money. The rest don’t count.”
