Cuba has set up more than 25 field hospitals in Haiti after the quake.

The members of the Cuban Medical Brigade and of the Henry Reeve Brigade, who are in Haiti, arrived in the commune of Carrefour, some 15 kilometers of Port-au-Prince, in order to broaden the health care to the Haitian people. With the help of neighbors, the Cubans set up a well-equipped field hospital in the playground of Henri Christophe primary school.

This is the third field hospital that Cuba deploys, as part of the solidarity mission of cooperation and health provision in the surrounding of the Haitian capital, hit by an earthquake measuring 7.3 degrees on the Richter Scale on Tuesday, January 12th.

Cuban field hospitals are located in the arrondissements of Léogâne and Jacmel and now in Carrefour, located in the southwest portion of the mountainous nation and epicenter of the quake, an area that was brutally affected for being near the sea.

A resident of Carrefour told the Cuban Radio correspondent that the death toll, resulting from the tremor and its aftershock, is countless. On the streets you can feel an atmosphere of destruction, only comparable to that caused by a bombing.

Cuban brigades arrived here to complement the work Doctors without Borders are doing at the Hospital of Carrefour, the only place which is providing medical services to this community.

In many cases, two doctors have been performing amputations and cleaning wounds, but there are not specialists in orthopedic surgery, and ten days after the catastrophe untreated open fractures abound among the victims.

Specialist in Orthopedics and Traumatology, doctor Juan Enrique Pacheco Gonzalez, who runs the field hospital in Carrefour, explained that they decided to set up the hospital in that place because the health system there completly collapsed, and the population is totally unprotected.

Pacheco González added that practitioners, both Cubans and Haitians who had studied in the neigbouring island, are offering medical services in various specialties.

He added that this field hospital has a lab, X-ray and ultrasound equipment, plus an operating room, which offers services in OB-GYN, Orthopedics and General Surgery.

In Carrefour's Hospital the head of Doctors without Borders stated that the Cuban medical aid was welcomed because it is an important and necessary contribution of surgeons, since there are still many people with traumas and injuries. While, they can only attend to patients with less serious injuries.

She also said that she had previously worked with Cuban doctors and considered they have a high level of professionalism and experience in organizing such relief missions. The most urgent thing now is to help the Haitian people, she emphasized. (Photo: Juvenal Balan/ AIN FOTO)

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