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

Brouwer, Steve Brouwer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583672397 ISBN 13: 9781583672396

Publisher: Monthly Review Press, 2011

Synopsis

Revolutionary Doctors gives readers a first-hand account of Venezuela’s innovative and inspiring program of community healthcare, 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 healthcare through the direct empowerment of the people it aims to serve.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

(

"Steve Brouwer is one of the nation's best front-line reporters from the ongoing class war."
)-(Barbara Ehrenreich), ()

"Steve Brouwer is one of the nation's best front-line reporters from the ongoing class war."
-Barbara Ehrenreich,

About this edition

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1583672397
• ISBN 13: 9781583672396
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240