¡Salud!

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.

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More on ¡Salud! and Cuban health care at www.saludthefilm.net. (en espanol)

Website resources include a Discussion Guide for general audiences, and Study Guides for Health Professionals and for use in Classrooms.

!Salud!, documentary, 93 min. Produced & Directed by Connie Field. Co-produced by Gail Reed.

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Some Clips and Quotes from ¡Salud!

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

“Cuba also has extremely advanced technology in the development of new medicines, some of them innovative on a world class scale… and their outreach program to other countries is unequaled anywhere in the world.”

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Dr. Paul Farmer
Harvard Medical School and Partners in Health

“The most important contribution Cuba has made to global health is its example—that you can introduce the notion of a right to health care and wipe out the diseases of poverty.”

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Dr. Yamila de Armas
Specialist in Family Medicine, Havana

“Our everyday battle is a tough one because of our economic situation… Even though sometimes we lack resources,medicines, equipment, we've never lacked for health professionals close to people.”

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Dr. Roberto Capote
First Cuban Medical Team, Algeria

“It started with the idea that there was always someone worse off than ourselves and that we could share the little we had.”

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Hon. Bennie Thompson,
U.S. House of Representatives, Mississippi

“Of 23 counties that I represent, 22 of them are medically underserved… One of the reasons the Congressional Black Caucus wanted to go to Cuba is that as we traveled around the world, in some of the most remote places we would always run up on Cuban doctors. So we went to Cuba.”

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