Cuba's medical foreign aid vs. American's military foreign aid.

If you want to make friends with the top government leaders of a nation, you will rarely go wrong giving them military foreign aid. But Cuba has shown that there is a way to get the people of foreign nations to be our friends. This is from Steve Clemons (as I promised a while back):

Cuba used to export soldiers, weapons, and the ideology if not entirely the reality of Fidel and Che style revolution.

Today, Cuba exports doctors. More on that another time -- but just as a quick aside, Cuba has exported tens of thousands of doctors to some of the poorest and most remote parts of Latin America as well as other parts of the world. Cuba actually maintains a highly successful bartering arrangement of doctors for oil with Venezuela. This is clearly a page out of the 'spirit' of the John F. Kennedy initiated Peace Corps. (For other dimensions of Cuba's international medical "public diplomacy", a great resource is MEDICC.)

President Bush, in contrast, offered during his recent trip through Latin America to those in medical need some treatment on the USNS Comfort, an American warship outfitted to provide medical support at "ports" that the ill would need to travel to.

Specifically, the USNS Comfort will make port calls in Belize, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname. President Bush's offer is a somewhat commendable, first step -- but in contrast, Cuban doctors are deployed in small villages and remote mountain regions. They are embedded in countries much like Peace Corps staff are. But American style relief comes on a war ship with the needy making their way to us, not us doing more to reach them.

While too much of American foreign policy has become over-militarized, Cuba's, quite remarkably, has become more humanized and more reflective of the hard gains that can come from Joe Nye's notion of "soft power."

The only nations that need military aid are those with aggressive neighbors and those who want to use the military to protect their government form their own people. But almost all nations need additional health care services, and those services are best provided close to the customers.

There is also the fact that military equipment and personnel are a drain on every nation that pays for them. They provide nothing positive economically. This is very unlike spending on health care services. A healthy populace is a highly productive populace.

This looks like a really good idea to me. Of course, American conservatives will hate it. They don't like people helping others. All they like is leaders helping other leaders oppressing and otherwise ignoring the hoi polloi.