Farmer is on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program ("GPS"), this hour (1 pm Sun).
Watching it now.
Louis Proyect wrote:
If I had the time, I'd love to dig into this topic. I was just telling
my wife that one passage from my comic book memoir that had to be
dropped to satisfy the maximum word requirement was about the C.
family in Woodridge, an example of Jewish criminality that persisted
into the 1950s. It was around 1959 or so that the patriarch, Bushkie,
opened a gambling casino in Port au-Prince. One son would become a
bank-robber later on and another was involved with some cancer
research fundraising scam it would seem. Anyhow, Bushkie and his sons
made enough of a splash in this enterprise to garner attention in
Newsweek. I told my wife this morning that nobody would ever consider
building a casino in Haiti today, which raises the question of when
the economy reached the total collapse of more recent times. Consider
as well that Graham Greene's "The Comedians" does not describe a
tableau of complete economic misery. His Haiti is certainly poor but
not that much more so than other Caribbean islands. I think that Paul
Farmer's book on Haiti would be a good place to start, speaking of
which there's this profile on him in the July 3, 2000 New Yorker
magazine that I keep returning to in terms of political economy:
Leaving Haiti, Farmer didn’t stare down through the airplane window at
that brown and barren third of an island. "It bothers me even to look
at it," he explained, glancing out. "It can’t support eight million
people, and there they are. There they are, kidnapped from West Africa."
But when we descended toward Havana he gazed out the window intently,
making exclamations: "Only ninety miles from Haiti, and look! Trees!
Crops! It’s all so verdant. At the height of the dry season! The same
ecology as Haiti’s, and look!"
An American who finds anything good to say about Cuba under Castro
runs the risk of being labelled a Communist stooge, and Farmer is fond
of Cuba. But not for ideological reasons. He says he distrusts all
ideologies, including his own. "It’s an ‘ology,’ after all," he wrote
to me once, about liberation theology. "And all ologies fail us at
some point." Cuba was a great relief to me. Paved roads and old
American cars, instead of litters on the 'gwo wout ia'. Cuba had food
rationing and allotments of coffee adulterated with ground peas, but
no starvation, no enforced malnutrition. I noticed groups of
prostitutes on one main road, and housing projects in need of repair
and paint, like most buildings in the city. But I still had in mind
the howling slums of Port-au-Prince, and Cuba looked lovely to me.
What looked loveliest to Farmer was its public-health statistics.
Many things affect a public’s health, of course—nutrition and
transportation, crime and housing, pest control and sanitation, as
well as medicine. In Cuba, life expectancies are among the highest in
the world. Diseases endemic to Haiti, such as malaria, dengue fever,
T.B., and AIDS, are rare. Cuba was training medical students gratis
from all over Latin America, and exporting doctors gratis— nearly a
thousand to Haiti, two en route just now to Zanmi Lasante. In the
midst of the hard times that came when the Soviet Union dissolved, the
government actually increased its spending on health care. By American
standards, Cuban doctors lack equipment, and are very poorly paid, but
they are generally well trained. At the moment, Cuba has more doctors
per capita than any other country in the world—more than twice as many
as the United States. "I can sleep here," Farmer said when we got to
our hotel. "Everyone here has a doctor."
Farmer gave two talks at the conference, one on Haiti, the other on
"the noxious synergy" between H.I.V. and T.B.—an active case of one
often makes a latent case of the other active, too. He worked on a
grant proposal to get anti-retroviral medicines for Cange, and at the
conference met a woman who could help. She was in charge of the United
Nations’ project on AIDS in the Caribbean. He lobbied her over several
days. Finally, she said, "O.K., let’s make it happen." ("Can I give
you a kiss?" Farmer asked. "Can I give you two?") And an old friend,
Dr. Jorge Perez, arranged a private meeting between Farmer and the
Secretary of Cuba’s Council of State, Dr. José Miyar Barruecos. Farmer
asked him if he could send two youths from Cange to Cuban medical
school. "Of course," the Secretary replied.
Again and again during our stay, Farmer marvelled at the warmth with
which the Cubans received him. What did I think accounted for this?
I said I imagined they liked his connection to Harvard, his published
attacks on American foreign policy in Latin America, his admiration of
Cuban medicine.
I looked up and found his pale-blue eyes fixed on me. "I think it’s
because of Haiti," he declared. "I think it’s because I serve the poor."
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
