A spiffy new tour bus pulled up to the top eye hospital in Cuba on a
sunny day this month and disgorged 47 working-class people from El
Salvador, many of whom could barely see because they had thick
cataracts in their eyes.

Among them were Francisca Antonia Guevara, a 74-year-old housewife
from Ciudad Delgado whose world was a blur. She said she had visited
an eye doctor in her home country but could not even pay the $200
needed for artificial lens implants, much less for the surgery.

"As someone of few resources, I couldn't afford it," she said. "With
the bad economic situation we have there, how are we going to afford
this?" Cuba's economy is not exactly booming either, yet within two
hours Guevara's cataracts were excised and the lens implanted, with
the Cuban government paying for everything - including air
transportation, housing, food, and even the follow-up care.

The government has dubbed the program Operation Miracle, and for the
hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela, Central America and
the Caribbean who have benefited from it since it was started in July
2004, it is aptly named.

Yet the program is no simple humanitarian effort, and it has not come
without a cost. The campaign against blindness serves as a poignant
advertisement for the benefits of Cuban socialism, as well as an
ingenuous way to export one of the few things the Cuban state-run
economy produces in abundance: doctors.

Cuban doctors abroad receive much better pay than those who remain in
Cuba, along with other benefits from the state, like the right to buy
a car and get a relatively luxurious house when they return. As a
result, many of the finest physicians have taken posts abroad.

The corps of doctors and nurses left in Cuba are stretched thin and
overworked, resulting in a decline in the quality of care for Cubans,
some doctors and patients said.

The Cuban authorities say they have treated more than 750,000 people
for eye problems like cataracts and glaucoma since the program
started.

At the same time, Cuban doctors have set up 37 small eye hospitals in
Latin America, the Caribbean and Mali. Twenty-five of the centers are
in Venezuela and Bolivia, whose leaders have close ties to the Castro
regime in Cuba. The hospitals are manned with more than 70 top-notch
eye surgeons from Cuba and hundreds of other nurses and
ophthalmologists.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/19/america/havana.php