Madam, – Cuba is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its revolution, an extraordinary achievement in the face of great adversity and hardship resulting primarily from the economic blockade imposed by its mighty neighbour to the north as far back as 1962. Despite the blockade, Cuba has developed a globally renowned healthcare system that has enabled this small, impoverished island nation to train 78,000 doctors over the past 50 years to work in more than 100 countries.
Cuba has also provided free education to its 11 million citizens and shown the kind of political commitment to social welfare that is sadly missing from many nations in the western hemisphere. It survived the Cold War, though many predicted that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc would extend to this pocket of the Caribbean. But that was to misunderstand the basis of the revolution, which is genuinely popular and a source of great pride among the Cuban people. Despite the devastation wreaked by three hurricanes and a worldwide economic recession, the country remarkably recorded economic growth of 4.3 per cent in 2008.
Where Cuba was once chided as a socialist dinosaur, its underpinning principles and values are suddenly in vogue again. As Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin prepares to visit Cuba in the new year (The Irish Times, December 29th), I urge him to work toward an end of the US blockade and encourage more positive engagement with Havana by the EU and US.
Such a timely move toward rapprochement would be widely welcomed in Latin America and the Caribbean. – Yours, etc,