Mission Miracle to restore the sight of millions of Latin Americans
Published: August 23, 2005
Cuba and Venezuela have sealed a commitment over the next 10 years to restore the sight of millions of Latin Americans who lack the economic resources for an operation, as part of the extension of the Mission Miracle program throughout the region.
This was announced by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez during edition No. 231 of the popular television space “Aló Presidente,” transmitted from the Sandino municipality in the extreme west of the island’s Pinar del Río province, where 150 homes have been rebuilt by a brigade from the homeland of Bolívar for families affected by recent hurricanes.
Christened the Sandino Commitment, the program proposes to attend to 600,000 patients per year in the Cuban facilities involved in the mission and in Venezuelan health centers to be brought into the humanitarian project, including military hospitals.
The determination to seal such an elevated commitment in this place acquired great symbolic value on being proclaimed in the locality of Sandino, named after the Nicaraguan hero assassinated in 1934, and in the heart of Villa Bolívar, the name of the community built by Venezuelan soldiers.
Both presidents commented on the progress of the Mission Miracle program, and noted that Angel Quintero, the 50,00th Venezuelan patient to benefit from that cooperative project of solidarity, was operated on the previous day (August 20) in Cuba. Almost at the end of the TV program it was announced that the total of patients having undergone surgery had risen to 50,403.
As the two statesmen explained, some 100,000 Venezuelans with various eye diseases are to be operated on in Cuba this year, an achievement made possible by the efficiency of the island’s ophthalmologic surgery.
Suffice it to say that on August 20 alone, 1,648 persons with sight problems underwent surgery, which gives some measure of the enormous effort being made by specialists in charge of the program.
Chávez and Fidel talked with Venezuelan patients undergoing this treatment in Cuban hospitals, some of them who have recently had operations, and who expressed their heartfelt gratitude at having recovered such a vital sense.
A call from the state of Caraboba in Venezuela shaped one of the most emotional moments of the Aló Presidente. Rotsell Loreto related how, after being rejected by doctors in a private clinic, she arrived in Cuba in a critical condition.
She explained that she was virtually paralyzed and catatonic as the result of rheumatoid arthritis and how the doctors and all the personnel at the Salvador Allende Hospital in Havana achieved her total recovery.
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