Katrina aid from Cuba? No thanks, says U.S.

Mary Murray Producer • E-mail

HAVANA — Dr. Luis Sauchay is the kind of hands-on physician you want in an emergency.

Though relatively young at 34, Sauchay has chalked up more than a decade of practicing hardship medicine.

Right out of medical school, he spent two years on the high seas, the only doctor for hundreds of fishermen aboard an industrial vessel.

During two other years, he cared for the sick and forgotten in an understaffed African clinic, treating countless cases of tuberculosis and cholera.

For the last five years, he has been the local family doctor for 200 working-class families in Havana’s Párraga neighborhood.

And after last December’s tsunami, Sauchay joined a Cuban medical brigade to comfort the shell-shocked in Sri Lanka.

So it was no surprise when just a day after Katrina decimated the Gulf Goast that Sauchay volunteered to help victims even though it means leaving his wife alone with their 2-month-old son.

“I can do a lot of good there,” he stressed, “because I have years of experience dealing with this type of catastrophe.”

Sauchay, though, may never get the chance to prove his worth. Despite Bush administration assurances that international aid offers will be kept free of politics, Cold War tensions seem to be freezing out help from Cuba.

Thanks, but no thanks
In separate Washington press briefings, both the White House and State Department spokesmen this week downplayed the Cuban government’s offer to send some 1,600 medics, field hospitals and 83 tons of medical supplies to ease the humanitarian disaster.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack asserted last week that the Cuban medical brigade would probably not be needed since there has been a “robust response from the American medical community.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan scorned the Cuban proposal last Thursday when asked if the president would consider accepting the Cuban help.

“When it comes to Cuba,” said McClellan, “we have one message for Fidel Castro: He needs to offer the people of Cuba their freedom.”

Sauchay and the other Cuban physicians don’t seem to be taking the hint their services may not be wanted.

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