Cuban Art & Living

I recently met a Miami doctor in the restaurant of Havana’s old José Martí airport.  Since we were the only two people in the room, we lunched together, and he shared his medical experience in Cuba.

“I’m not Cuban.  I’m American and I am 75 years old.  I’ve been coming to Cuba twice a month for seven years to do  arthroscopic knee surgery. We don’t do knee replacements here because the Cuban doctors can’t do the follow-up.  They are excellent at working in developing countries because their abilities are like that of 40 years ago… thorough, knowledgeable and caring .  But they don’t have the technology and don’t know what to do with the medicine that surrounds it.

“Anyway,  I just go in, do my work, and I do not discuss politics, U.S. medicine or anything.  I just do my job.

“I use to do this in the hospital in Havana, but the foreign student doctors would gravitate to me to learn. It was I who should have been listening to the Cubans.  So now, I work at a hospital in Pinar del Rio, where there are not all those foreign student doctors around.  I think I wore out my welcome in Havana.