Medical aid to Cuba hits snags

HAVANA

It was a story meant to captivate the United Nations: A dozen Cuban children with heart defects were forced to endure unnecessary surgery because the U.S. embargo blocked them from receiving American-made catheters.

The embargo as a whole “could be classified as an act of genocide,” Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said before the U.N. General Assembly voted 187-3 in October to condemn U.S. policy toward Cuba for the 18th year running.

A dramatic argument - but the facts behind it are fuzzy and tangled in the bureaucracies of two hostile countries.

U.S. law exempted medicine and health care supplies from the embargo in 1992. It also lifted the ban on agricultural exports in 2000 and is now Cuba’s biggest supplier of food - $710 million worth last year.

The U.S. says it approved about $142 million in commercial and donated medical exports to the communist island in 2008. So why did less than 1 percent of it get here?

The answer lies somewhere in a war of words between the estranged countries and provides a cautionary lesson as the U.S. and Cuba take halting steps toward better ties: Reality often takes a back seat to rhetoric.

Cuba claims that despite the embargo exemption, the U.S. government imposes extra regulations on medical exports to discourage American companies from participating.

U.S. medical-export firms interviewed by the Associated Press agree the paperwork can be troublesome, but say they won’t go on the record or give specific examples for fear of jeopardizing pending or future export applications. Others complained about both sides in private, but said they preferred not to do so for attribution given how touchy a subject U.S.-Cuba relations can be.

The U.S. Commerce Department says it takes only about 14 days to get a license to export medical supplies to Cuba - about twice as fast as for ordinary exports to other countries.

Another factor, according to two U.S. suppliers and a research group, is that China or other countries provide the goods more cheaply.

“It’s not the embargo,” said John Kavulich, a senior policy adviser at the New York-based U.S.-Cuba Economic Trade Council, which provides nonpartisan commercial and economic information about Cuba. “These are economic and political decisions not to buy.”

In his U.N. speech, and later to reporters, Mr. Rodriguez, the Cuban foreign minister, singled out the case of Alexis Garcia Iribar, a 6-year-old born in the eastern province of Guantanamo with a congenital heart defect who underwent successful but unnecessary surgery in March.

Mr. Rodriguez gave no further details, but said he could have mentioned a dozen other cases in which children between the ages of 5 months and 13 years also went under the knife for want of technology made only in the United States.

Mr. Rodriguez named four U.S. companies he said were blocked by the embargo from selling catheters or other desperately needed supplies to Cuba.

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