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Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care

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Revolutionary Doctors gives readers a first-hand account of Venezuela’s innovative and inspiring program of community health care, designed to serve—and largely carried out by—the poor themselves. Drawing on long-term participant observations as well as in-depth research, Brouwer tells the story of Venezuela’s Integral Community Medicine program, in which doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to recruit and train doctors from among peasants and workers. Such programs were first developed in Cuba, and Cuban medical personnel play a key role in Venezuela today as advisors and organizers. This internationalist model has been a great success—Cuba is a world leader in medicine and medical training—and Brouwer shows how the Venezuelans are now, with the aid of their Cuban counterparts, following suit.

But this program is not without its challenges. It has faced much hostility from traditional Venezuelan doctors as well as all the forces antagonistic to the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions. Despite the obstacles it describes, Revolutionary Doctors demonstrates how a society committed to the well-being of its poorest people can actually put that commitment into practice, by delivering essential health care through the direct empowerment of the people it aims to serve.

Read an excerpt in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Read a review in People’s World

What a terrific book! I have been researching Cuban medical internationalism for several years, and found Steve Brouwer’s book an excellent, insightful first-person account of how Cuban medical cooperation (and not aid!) is changing the face of the developing world.

—John Kirk, Professor of Latin American Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada; author, Cuban Medical Internationalism: Origins, Evolution, and Goals

The Cuban medical education model, so eloquently described in this book, has not merely transformed health care in much of Central and South America. It has shown doctors and medical students who work in the unjust and dysfunctional U.S. health care system that another world is possible.

—Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH; professor of public health, CUNY; visiting professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School

Venezuela and Cuba clearly show that the basic human right of access to medical and health care in time of need is not dependent on the level of economic development. Venezuela and Cuba are not rich countries yet, and in spite of this, health care reaches the majority of their populations. They should be considered points of reference for poor countries that want to break with the underdevelopment of health. This book is a rigorous and balanced account of how they did it.

—Vicente Navarro, MD, PhD; professor of health policy, The Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University; editor-in-chief, International Journal of Health Services

Revolutionary Doctors tells the story of Cuba’s extraordinary medical personnel who leave their homes and families to support radical struggles for health care abroad. And it shows how this struggle is taken up in places like Venezuela, where poor communities are organizing to provide health care from the ground up. This is a story that deserves to be known.

—Sujatha Fernandes, assistant professor of sociology, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center; author, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela

Steve Brouwer is one of the nation’s best front-line reporters from the ongoing class war.

—Barbara Ehrenreich, author, Nickel and Dimed

Steve Brouwer is the author of Robbing Us Blind: The Return of the Bush Gang; Sharing the Pie: A Citizen’s Guide to Wealth and Power in the United States; Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (co-authored with Susan D. Rose); and Conquest and Capitalism, 1492-1992. He is also a carpenter and designer, and has organized worker-owned construction businesses and housing cooperatives. In 2007-2008, he lived in a rural village in the mountains of Venezuela and wrote about his campesino neighbors and the Bolivarian Revolution.

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SKU: mrp2396 Categories: , , ,
Topics: Marxism Socialism Places: Latin America

Publication Date: May 2011

Number of Pages: 240

Paperback ISBN: 9781583672396

Cloth ISBN: 9781583672402

eBook ISBN: 9781583672693