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Witness to a Crime
By Jim
Veverka
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Dr.
Anthony Kirkpatrick (center) meets with doctors and nurses at the
Central Pediatrics Hospital in Havana.
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Until recently, Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick worked as a physician at the Veterans Administration medical center in Tampa, Florida, where he directed the hospital's chronic pain program. There, he was praised by his supervisors for devoting "considerable energies to the human rights field, where he has an international reputation for defending victims of government policies." But when those considerable energies expose the State Department's role in concealing the disastrous impact of the U.S. embargo on Cuba--well, that's a different story.
In 1993, Kirkpatrick went to Cuba to do research. "I wanted to see how a health care system would operate in a Communist country," he says.
In Cuba, Kirkpatrick was surprised to witness an epidemic of neurological disease caused by a food shortage. More than 50,000 Cubans were experiencing symptoms ranging from blindness and deafness to burning sensations in their hands and feet and loss of bowel and bladder control. Doctors, lacking sensation in their hands, were unable to perform surgery. Perhaps most troubling was the fact that no one knew precisely why all of this was happening.
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In These Times ©
1999
Volume 24, Number 3 |