Helping a troubled neighbor… together

The White House announced today that Cuba has opened its airspace—an area from which U.S. aircraft are usually restricted—for medical evacuation flights from Haiti. “We have coordinated with the Cuban government for authorization to fly medical evacuation flights from the U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Miami, Fla., through Cuban airspace,” a spokesman said. This cuts about 90 minutes from a one-way flight, minutes that are precious for the relief effort, which has been impressive in response time but as yet far from sufficient as victims of the Haitian earthquake continue to crowd the streets of Port-au-Prince waiting for food, water, and medical assistance.

Following my comments Wednesday, Steve Clemons expanded Thursday on the potential for US-Cuba cooperation in the relief effort in Haiti. The United States is devoting massive resources to the effort, and Cuba has a long history and wide experience with disaster relief and provision of emergency medical services worldwide. Their coordinated action, putting aside differences, makes perfect sense in pursuing the best outcome for Haiti from this awful event. Agreements on airspace are the first step in such a partnership. More from Clemons’ excellent Guardian piece:

“After Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans and southern Mississippi, Fidel Castro offered relief support from a 1,600 person medical team called the Henry Reeves Brigade, named after an American doctor who fought in Cuba’s war of independence. The US predictably turned down the offer in September 2005.

“Shortly afterwards, in October 2005, the Reeves Brigade was dispatched to help provide much-needed medical relief after the devastating Kashmir earthquake that tore through the Himalayan mountain region along Pakistan and Kashmir. The US and Europe each sent teams of doctors to Pakistan, each with one base camp deployed for a month. The Cubans deployed seven major base camps and 30 field hospitals in the fundamentalist Islamic region of Pakistan, a nation with which Cuba did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Today, the Cubans and Pakistanis have embassies in each other’s capitals.

“Bruno Rodriguez, now foreign minister of Cuba, headed the mission and lived in Pakistan’s rugged mountains for that full year. The Cuban medical teams reportedly worked constructively and positively with personnel from the US and Europe – and this kind of collaboration, even if informal, could be the kind of confidence-building narrative to move US-Cuba relations out of the gridlock they have been in for decades.

“Haiti is in trouble today – with the earthquake devastating the capital city of Port-au-Prince and highlighting what was already a human development disaster even before the 7.0 quake hit… Notwithstanding any casualties among its own citizens living in Haiti, Cuba currently has 408 doctors providing services there.

“This is time for the US, for Cuba, and other major Latin American nations to throw their weight into stopping a worse human tragedy in Haiti than already exists – and to potentially tie the US and Cuba together in a way that creates greater positives for Haiti and for longer-term, 21st century US-Cuba relations.”

(AP Photo/Medecins Sans Frontieres, Stefano Zannini)