USA/Cuba InfoMed

Five Years of Partnership for Health and Medical Information!

P.O. Box 450
Santa Clara, CA, 95052
Phone:(408) 243-4359
FAX: (408) 243-1229

Over the course of the last five years and with an all-volunteer staff, USA/Cuba InfoMed prepared and dispatched 1,400 personal computers to the medical information network in Cuba, called InfoMed. Although receiving substantial and repeated support from the United Nations Development Programme for file servers and other capital equipment, InfoMed director Pedro Urra revealed to us that our California based group remains InfoMed's practically sole source of PCs, intended for use by the island's 70,000 physicians, and medical researchers to access medical databases (including the American Cancer Society's.)

At the end of July 1999, sixteen of our volunteers loaded a 40-foot cargo container with 500 PC systems, plus lots of peripheral equipment and sent it off by rail to the port of Montreal. This capped off a whole year's worth of computer checkout/repair work. After more delay in Canada, the. cargo arrived in Havana by ship on September 2.

Our project, which proceeds in the face of semi-hostility on the part of our federal government, continues to fulfill a vital humanitarian function: substantially aiding the medical system of a nation of 11 million people.

There are many unusual and newsworthy aspects of our work. Let us cite a few examples:

Our current export license, which circumvents the prohibition of furnishing aid to an agency of the Cuban government, is drafted to ship our next 1,500 computers directly the Cuba's Ministry of Public Health (rather than to a intermediate third party e.g., a church or the Pan American Health Organization.) It was Rep. Tom Campbell who drafted a letter to Commerce Sec. William Daley, asking for this concession. Rep. Campbell obtained the signatures of 15 of his colleagues in the House of Representatives, including almost the entire Bay Area delegation plus others across the country. It included the signatures of four Republicans.

Several months ago a prestigious Medical Clinic offered to donate to our group 1,800 Pentium computers (up to 166 MHz) which they've deemed obsolete. The clinic's doctors had visited the InfoMed office in Havana and were so impressed with their work that they moved to direct those computers to InfoMed Cuba via our organization -conditioned on our ability to secure an export license for computers currently barred from Cuba The limit on CTP for Cuba is 24.8 MTOPS. (China can receive machines up to 12,300 MTOPS.(?))

Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland drafted another letter to Sec. Daley requesting a waiver on that restriction and to allow us to send initially 500 Pentium computers. That letter has 19 congressional signatures, including Tom Campbell's and the other Bay Area representatives. We learn today that our export license application for those Pentiums has passed through State and Defense Departments and we just learned (9/7/99) that

HAS BEEN APPROVED!!!

Thank you Representative Barbara Lee et al. for your mediation and support!

We are now in a position to send to Cuba 500 Pentium Computers!

Many hospitals and clinics, doctors, nurses and patients will benefit !

Another victory against the blockade of Cuba!

Going back to othre recent acxcomplishments, in October 1998, three of our local volunteers traveled to Havana to meet with four visiting medical librarians from Jamaica, in the InfoMed offices. We initiated a three-way project in which our California group will provide some material resources, the InfoMed folks in Cuba will provide the expertise and the Jamaicans will receive a medical information network that will link up the island's 19 hospitals, beginning with those in Kingston. Cuban InfoMed technicians have already visited Kingston to analyze the needs.

In January 1999, the Havana bureau of CNN requested and received assistance from the San Francisco office to video record an interview with our volunteers in our workshop in Santa Clara. The interview was coupled with a similar one from InfoMed in Havana and was telecast in Latin America and select locations in the U.S. (Arizona, New Mexico).

Over the past two years, our USA/Cuba InfoMed group has made presentation at medical conferences, including the American Public Health Association, the American Medical Informatics Association, and an international conference on Medicine and the Internet in Brighton, England.

Cuba's InfoMed personnel began the network in 1992, based on Linux file servers. (Windows 95 is used at the terminals) Recently, the InfoMed people have begun to promote the use of Linux throughout all institutions on the island. Periodically InfoMed technicians are being employed by the United Nations in New York, where they are training Latin American network operators in the fine art of network creation and management, using Linux. After completing one such session, two of InfoMed's staff visited with us in Silicon Valley to attend the first LinuxWorld Conference last March at the McEnry Convention Center. (Deputy Director Valentin Gonzalez, on the floor of the Convention Center, uttered "Coming to this conference is like a Catholic visiting the Vatican.")

The InfoMed staff has inaugurated the National Telemedicine Network to transmit graphic images (CAT scans, MRI, X-Ray, biopsy samples) for distance diagnoses, and the Virtual University of Medicine to upgrade the skills of specialists with Web-based formal courses for credit. So far 30 courses are offered. Our USA group will be supporting these efforts.

Altogether, we feel that our California volunteer group has a record of achievement that is worthy of your support .

Sincerely,

David Wald & Juan Reardon
Co-founders

USA/Cuba InfoMed
P.O. Box 450
Santa Clara , CA
95052

(408) 243-4359
Fax: (408) 243-1229

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Project USA/Cuba InfoMed