Salud – What puts Cuba on the map in the quest for globalhealth

A Film Produced And Directed by Connie Field

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University of Ottawa
Friday February 29, 2008
Screening begins 19h30
Venue: MacDonald Hall Auditorium (MCD 146), 150 Louis Pasteur Street, Ottawa, Ontario

USA / 2006 / 93 minutes / English and Spanish w/EST

A timely examination of human values and the health issues that affect us all, ¡Salud!looks at the curious case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with what the BBC calls ‘one of the world’s best health systems.
From the shores of Africa to the Americas, !Salud!hits the road with some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals serving in 68 countries, and explores the hearts and minds of international medical students in Cuba -now numbering 30,000, including nearly 100 from the USA. Their stories plus testimony from experts around the world bring home the competing agendas that mark the battle for global health—and the complex realities confronting the movement to make healthcare everyone’s birth right.

Against the alarming backdrop of the global health crisis and deteriorating public health systems in even the richest nations, ¡Salud! tells the little-known story of Cuba: a poor country overcoming its lack of resources to provide universal health care and help other developing nations do the same.

A feature documentary, ¡Salud! is directed by Academy Award nominee Connie Field and co-produced by Gail Reed. The film spans three continents to look at the philosophy and health professionals placing Cuba on the map in the worldwide movement to make health care a global birthright. Today, Cubans are among the world’s healthiest people, despite the island’s poverty. Cuba’s volunteer corps now posts 28,000 health professionals in 68 countries; and Cuban medical schools will graduate an unprecedented 100,000 new doctors from developing countries over the next decade.

The film’s cameras reach into The Gambia, rural South Africa, coastal villages of Honduras and river settlements in the Amazon, where a Cuban is often the first doctor a poor community has ever seen. In some nations they staff entire health systems. In all, they take with them the experience and philosophy of their own community-oriented, preventive and universal health care model fundamentally at odds with a global wave of healthcare privatization.

¡Salud! questions what propels Cuban doctors to serve where most others won’t, and grapples with the tensions their presence sometimes provokes.
To Read more go to:
www.saludthefilm.net/ns/synopsis.html

Movie reviews:
www.saludthefilm.net/ns/reviews.html

The Filmmakers Bio:
www.saludthefilm.net/ns/behind-the-lens.html
www.clarityfilms.org/about.html

Movie Trailer:

Youtube profile:
www.youtube.com/clarityfilms

News clips about Cuba Healthcare, the Hospitals Michael Moore won't show in his film, Sicko.

Footage of a Cuba Hospital Room

To see more real videos of inside cuba's hospitals, go to:
www.youtube.com/cubano1979
www.youtube.com/cubanetwork

The Cuban Approach to Health Care: Origins, Results, and Current Challenges
www.saludthefilm.net/ns/cuba-health-system.html

Global Health: A Gordian Knot?
www.saludthefilm.net/ns/global-health-briefs.html

To View Cast and Crew, go to:
www.saludthefilm.net/ns/people-in-the-film.html

» official site