Global Learning
  • Home
  • Defenders of Cuban Socialism
    • UN Charter
    • Declaration of Human Rights
    • Bandung
    • New International Economic Order
    • Non-Aligned Movement
  • Substack editorial column
  • New Cold War articles
  • Friends of Socialist China articles
  • Global Research articles
  • Counterpunch articles
  • Cuba and the world-system
    • Table of Contents and chapter summaries
    • About the author
    • Endorsements
    • Obtaining your copy
  • Blog ¨The View from the South¨
    • Blog Index
    • Posts in reverse chronological order
  • The Voice of Third World Leaders
    • Asia >
      • Ho Chi Minh
      • Xi Jinping, President of China
    • Africa >
      • Kwame Nkrumah
      • Julius Nyerere
    • Latin America >
      • Fidel Castro
      • Hugo Chávez
      • Raúl Castro >
        • 55th anniversary speech, January 1, 1914
        • Opening Speech, CELAC
        • Address at G-77, June 15, 2014
        • Address to National Assembly, July 5, 2014
        • Address to National Assembly, December 20, 2014
        • Speech on Venezuela at ALBA, 3-17-2015
        • Declaration of December 18, 2015 on USA-Cuba relations
        • Speech at ALBA, March 5, 2018
      • Miguel Díaz-Canel >
        • UN address, September 26, 2018
        • 100th annivesary, CP of China
      • Evo Morales >
        • About Evo Morales
        • Address to G-77 plus China, January 8, 2014
        • Address to UN General Assembly, September 24, 2014
      • Rafael Correa >
        • About Rafael Correa
        • Speech at CELAC 1/29/2015
        • Speech at Summit of the Americas 2015
      • Nicolás Maduro
      • Cristina Fernández
      • Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations >
        • Statement at re-opening of Cuban Embassy in USA, June 20, 2015
        • The visit of Barack Obama to Cuba
        • Declaration on parliamentary coup in Brazil, August 31, 2016
        • Declaration of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba on Venezuela, April 13, 2019
      • ALBA >
        • Declaration of ALBA Political Council, May 21, 2019
        • Declaration on Venezuela, March 17, 2015
        • Declaration on Venezuela, April 10, 2017
      • Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) >
        • Havana Declaration 2014
        • Declaration on Venezuela, March 26
    • Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • International >
      • Peoples’ Summit 2015
      • The Group of 77 >
        • Declaration on a New World Order 2014
        • Declaration on Venezuela 3/26/2015
      • BRICS
      • Non-Aligned Movement
  • Readings
    • Charles McKelvey, Cuba in Global Context
    • Piero Gleijeses, Cuba and Africa
    • Charles McKelvey, Chávez and the Revolution in Venezuela
    • Charles McKelvey, The unfinished agenda of race in USA
    • Charles McKelvey, Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist Revolutionary
  • Recommended Books
  • Contact

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Recommended books on Amazon.com; click on image of book to connect

Venezuela attains 100% medical attention

4/25/2017

0 Comments

 
      In the midst of the campaign by the major international news media, you are not likely to see that Venezuela has become the second country in the world, following Cuba, in attaining a total coverage of medical attention for all of its citizens.  The achievement is a consequence of a neighborhood health program, established fourteen years ago by Hugo Chávez.  As a result of the medical mission, Venezuela’s 31 million citizens today have access to nearly 600 “areas of health;” more than 500 Centers of Integral Diagnosis; 580 “rehabilitation halls;” thirty centers of high technology; 22,000 integral community doctors; and 63,000 health professionals.  The mission has included the education of 830 indigenous doctors, who are not divorced from the ancestral customs of their communities.  

     The medical system has been developed with the support of Cuba, which has sent health and other professionals to work in the South American nation.  I personally know doctors, nurses and professors who have worked for as much as three years in Venezuela.

      In a ceremony recognizing the achievement, doctors presented Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with the gift of a white medical coat and a stethoscope, and they declared the nation’s first worker president to be “Doctor Love.”  Maduro noted that the achievement is of no importance to the international news media.  But the indifference of the media cannot erase the achievement nor the fact that “the human miracle, of treating all human beings as what they are, is in march for millions.”  

      The achievement was reported by the Cuban journalist Alina Perera Robbio, who sent a special report to Granma, the Official Organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and the principal daily newspaper in Cuba.  On the same page, another article on Venezuela appears.  It describes the work of armed bands contracted by the Venezuelan opposition, who engaged in vandalism against various public installations, including an attack on an infant-maternal hospital.

      The opposition in Venezuela is driven by its particular interests.  Its leading forces are the large estate landholders and business elite, both of which are tied to international corporate capital, through their participation in the import-export commerce that is integral to the core-peripheral relation.  These economic sectors have a particular interest in opposition to an autonomous national project of economic and social development, the ultimate goal of which is to break the core-peripheral economic relation.  The opposition has, but does not openly propose, an anti-national and anti-popular project that wants to restore neoliberal polices, opening the national market to international penetration and weakening the role of the state.

       In seeking to influence the popular sectors, the Venezuelan elite exploits three possibilities.  (1) The highly educated sector of the workforce is for the most part able to find material security in a national economy shaped by the international core-peripheral relation, even though an autonomous national project offers more to the middle class in terms of a meaningful and more dignified national project.  (2)  The great majority of people tend to think in terms of their concrete daily needs, rather than thinking theoretically and historically.  The elite has exploited this human tendency by disrupting the economy through the denial of goods and services and by creating conflict through street violence.  Some of the people, thinking concretely, have a tendency to blame the government for such economic and political disruptions, supporting the opposition with a naïve hope for improving the situation. (3) Many people also have a tendency to not fully appreciate the significant societal effort that is involved in the providing of health care, education, and social services to an entire population, such that dissatisfaction with the government emerges, leading to a naïve hope for improvement through the opposition.

     In this strategy of exploitation, the elite is seeking to confuse and manipulate the people, exploiting their limitations.  The elite has the advantage of its ties to important economic and political actors on a global scale.  The national and international elites form a partnership in opposition to a government seeking to develop an autonomous project in defense of the people.  The elites control the international and national media of information, so that what the media sees and does not see is shaped by the particular interests of the elites.  In addition, the elites have a stranglehold on the national economy, enabling them to cause economic disruptions. For a national elite whose particular interests are more important than patriotism, the strategy is not to persuade the majority, but to cause sufficient disruption to justify a foreign intervention.

       Such is the battle unfolding in Venezuela, and it is merely one particular expression of a war on a global scale.  On the one side are those powerful forces that are committed to defend their particular interests in the neocolonial world-system.  Their policies are the weakening of states, the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, and military aggression.  They are presently divided between the more aggressive militarism and narrow nationalism of the Right (represented in the United States by Trump) and a less aggressive combination of hard and soft power in seeking to preserve neocolonial domination (represented by Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama).  On the other side are the movements and governments of the world that are proclaiming the unsustainability of the neocolonial world-system and the need to construct a more just, democratic and sustainable world-system (represented by the Non-Aligned Movement and ALBA).

       The Left in the nations of the North ought to more fully understand the alternative project being developed by the movements and nations of the Third World, in order that we can effectively explain to our peoples the necessity of casting our lot with the forces of change that are emerging from below.  If the peoples of the North were to form popular movements with knowledgeable appreciation of what ALBA, the Non-Aligned Movement and the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iran and China are attempting to do, the prospects for the cooperative development of a just, democratic and sustainable world-system would be significantly enhanced.

​
      
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author: Charles McKelvey

    Retired professor, writer,  and Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist revolutionary

    Categories

    All
    American Revolution
    Blog Index
    Bolivia
    Charismatic Leaders
    China
    Critique Of The Left
    Cuban History
    Cuba Today
    Ecuador
    Environment
    French Revolution
    Gay Rights
    Haitian Revolution
    Knowledge
    Latin American History
    Latin American Right
    Latin American Unity
    Marx
    Marxism-Leninism
    Mexican Revolution
    Miscellaneous
    Neocolonialism
    Neoliberalism
    Nicaragua
    North-South Cooperation
    Presidential Elections 2016
    Press
    Public Debate In USA
    Race
    Religion And Revolution
    Revolution
    Russian Revolution
    South-South Cooperation
    Third World
    Trump
    US Ascent
    US Imperialism
    Vanguard
    Venezuela
    Vietnam
    Wallerstein
    Women And Revolution
    World History
    World-System
    World-System Crisis

    Archives

    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    January 2013

    RSS Feed

    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture

More Ads


website by Sierra Creation