Whilst CSC’s own “Made in Cuba” blazes a trail for new and innovative ways to get solidarity messages across to new audiences, Salud! is a 90 minute movie produced and directed by Academy Award nominee Connie Field.
Although undoubtedly Michael Moore will generate more column inches with his film Sicko, Field’s film deserves vast praise as a compelling, upbeat, accurate and beautifully moving account of Cuba’s health system and how it makes a reality of the moral value that says health care is a human right. Not just in Cuba but around the world as well.
Lovingly filmed Salud! not only provides facts and details but should be required viewing for medical students around the world as its perspectives on different health care systems and methods of teaching are desperately needed in a world obsessed with marketising health as a commodity for profit and reward.
The protest in the film by Venezuelan doctors against “cubanisation” of their system is a protest in favour of reaction and greed. However, others speak out in the film “What is more important? Doctors protecting a monopoly of health care or the interests of the great majority who require health care now?”
This film is political and unashamedly asks for a paradigm shift in health service and practice thinking – preventative medicine putting patients and communities before professionals and business.
Salud! demonstrates clearly how a small blockaded island has impacted on health throughout the world. Cuba offers so much more than disaster relief or specialist clinical skills.
They take health services out to the poorest communities who have never seen doctors, seen in the film in the Gambia and Honduras, and in doing so bring hope for change. When the doctors who stayed on after Hurricane Mitch in the Honduras were sent home, popular people protests forced the government to invite them back.
Reflecting also on Cuba’s assistance and its effect in South Africa and Venezuela this is a remarkable film that I hope is shown at the House of Commons, cinemas and meetings across the country.
It is an emotionally powerful film showing Cuba’s real testimony to international solidarity and its dedication to improving the lot of those around the world who have nothing. It cannot fail to inspire.
