Revolutionary Doctors

    Revolutionary Doctors

    Steve Brouwer  |  2011
    Published by Monthly Review Press

    $18.95

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    Since the creation of the Venezuelan health mission Barrio Adentro, thousands of Cuban medical professionals have provided quality health care for some of Venezuela's poorest communities. Revolutionary Doctors gives readers a first-hand account of Venezuela's innovative and inspiring program of community health care, designed to serve, and largely carried out by, the poor themselves.

    “Revolutionary Doctors and health workers...are providing convincing proof that another world, a better world, is possible.”

    — Revolutionary Doctors

    Drawing on long-term participant observations as well as in-depth research, Steve Brouwer tells the story of Venezuela's National Program of Integral Community Medicine, in which doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to recruit and train doctors from among peasants and workers. This internationalist model has been a great success, and Brouwer shows how the Venezuelans are now, with the aid of their Cuban counterparts, following suit.

    But this program is not without its challenges. It has faced much hostility from traditional Venezuelan doctors, as well as all the forces antagonistic to the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions. Despite these obstacles, Revolutionary Doctors demonstrates how a society committed to the well-being of its poorest people can put that commitment into practice, by delivering essential health care through the direct empowerment of the people it aims to serve.

    Praise for Revolutionary Doctors

    “Steve Brouwer is one of the nation’s best front-line reporters from the ongoing class war.”
    — Barbara Ehrenreich, author, Nickel and Dimed

    “What a terrific book! I have been researching Cuban medical internationalism for several years, and found Steve Brouwer’s book an excellent, insightful first-person account of how Cuban medical cooperation (and not aid!) is changing the face of the developing world.”
    — John Kirk, Professor of Latin American Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada; author, Cuban Medical Internationalism: Origins, Evolution, and Goals

    “The Cuban medical education model, so eloquently described in this book, has not merely transformed health care in much of Central and South America. It has shown doctors and medical students who work in the unjust and dysfunctional US health care system that another world is possible.”
    — Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH; professor of public health, CUNY; visiting professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School