Cuban doctors assist victims of Hurricane Felix in Nicaragua

Cuban doctors stationed in this city in northeastern Nicaragua are continuing to attend to victims of Hurricane Felix, in the midst of the devastation left in its wake, including the destruction of the local hospital.

Cuban doctors are attending hurricane victims in improvised facilities in Puerto Cabezas.

The precarious conditions have not affected the determination of the health professionals, who are providing care for patients in improvised operating rooms and wards set up in the local offices of the National Technological Institute.

Doctor Osmar Martínez, coordinator of the Cuban medical brigade in the Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic (RAAN), told Prensa Latina that since the onslaught of the hurricane in the early hours of this past Tuesday, they have attended to more than 300 people.

"We have performed Cesareans here," Martínez explained, indicating one of the institute’s classrooms, which has been turned into a maternity ward, where at that moment, a Nicaraguan radiologist was doing an ultrasound for a pregnant woman from the Miskito community.

Along with Cuban doctors and local healthcare personnel, those working shoulder-to-shoulder with them in these improvised facilities include 20 young Nicaraguans in their fifth year of medical school at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM, in Cuba).

The group is part of the 59 students who in the weeks previous to the disaster had been carrying out community work in remote areas of Nicaragua under the supervision of instructors in the Cuban medical brigade.

According to preliminary estimates, the hurricane that hit Nicaragua’s northeastern coast as a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale (maximum) killed more than 40 people, destroyed some 10,000 homes and affected 50,000 people, leaving many homeless.

"We were also hit," Dr. Martínez commented half-jokingly, noting that Felix’s 260-kph winds destroyed the roof of the house where the brigade has been staying at the Institute since they arrived on April 25. But he added that despite the adversities, the morale of the doctors working in Puerto Cabezas was high, and had received a boost of encouragement via telephone calls from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations and the Council of State. (PL)