Patients wait for treatment at Mukono Health Centre, Uganda, during a
countrywide doctors strike. Uganda expects about 40 specialists of the
200 Cuban doctors to be deployed to public hospitals in the rural areas.
PHOTO | MORGAN MBABAZI | NATION 
In daily Ugandan parlance, a ‘Mu-cuba’ (singular, Bacuba-plural)
is an economic stand-in personnel. If your regular worker doesn’t show
up, you find a ‘cuban’ to stand in.
And when a
craftsman is out of a job, he hangs around work sites for opportunities
for a ‘ki-cuba’ — a temporary placement but with no full employment
benefits, just wages for strictly labour supplied.
‘Ki-cuba’
can also mean a moonlighting assignment executed in the strictest
confidence. A highly skilled staff who called in sick for a couple of
days can later confide in a friend that in reality he had been called
for a ‘ki-cuba’ in a rival organisation.
The commonest
‘ki-cuba’ we all encounter every day is in public transport. No urban
PSV commuter driver stays behind the wheel from day-break until late as
his employer demands or expects. He has to take a break at least for an
hour for lunch.
At that time, he hands over the vehicle
to a ‘cuban’ who is an out-of-job driver to do at least one route and
bring in an agreed sum.
It is these ‘cuban’ drivers who
cause most accidents because they are in hurry to maximise the
opportunity and make at least two routes and pocket something
substantial for themselves.
There is a country called
Cuba, whose citizens are Cubans. Some also know that the local ‘cuban,
references originated from Cuban revolutionaries who intervened in
liberation wars after the Cuban revolution succeeded.
So
when the iconic Che Guevarra’s party arrived in the region nearly six
decades ago in former Zaire, our people started referring to fighters
who go to fight other people’s wars as ‘cubans’.
These
days the wars by ‘cubans’ are economic. The first modern ‘cubans’ to
arrive in Uganda came after the economic war of 1972 declared by Idi
Amin who expelled Indians, ending with all foreign and non-indigenous
professionals leaving the country en mass as the dictatorship grew.
So
in 1973 the first economic war ‘cubans’ arrived, coincidentally from
India to work as doctors in the deserted public hospitals. And
ironically, indigenous Ugandan doctors also started leaving to go and do
their ‘ki-cuba’ in Kenya and other countries.
The
other heavily affected profession was teaching. Graduate teachers were
leaving in droves. The government brought in ‘cuban’ teachers from
Ghana.
The first real Cubans to come under government
auspices was shortly after Uganda’s 1986 revolution to help out their
fellow revolutionaries led by Yoweri Museveni, who had just taken power
and had found virtually everything broken down after five years of civil
war.
And yes, they played a big role in setting up
Uganda’s second public medical teaching university, the Mbarara
University of Science and Technology.
Cuban medical
science played a pivotal role in Uganda’s health sector in 1986 when the
young President sent a large number of his fighters for professional
military training in Cuba. Soon after their arrival there, he received a
shocking telephone call from Havana.
Comrade Fidel Castro broke the news to him that a big percentage of the Ugandans had the newly discovered virus, HIV.
By
1986, Cuba was already mass screening for HIV! That phone call
influenced Uganda’s early decision to be open about the epidemic, and
led to the country being an early leader whose Aids control model was
adopted by many other countries.
It is, therefore, no
surprise that President Museveni has again turned to Cuba to deal with
the chronic problem of doctor’s perpetual strikes.
The
government will import some 200 Cuban doctors to deliver health
services. And on Labour Day, President Museveni himself supported the
move and castigated the Ugandans who have been threatening to strike and
actually did so, calling them enemies of the country.
The
medical workers’ leaders have been putting up a spirited verbal
resistance to the move. They argue that the Cubans neither understands
English nor Ugandan languages.
The medical workers’
president, Dr Ekwaro Obuku argues against “importing a human resource
from a small island thousands of miles away while advocating African
solutions to African problems”. And so on and so forth, the arguments
continue.
Anytime from now, the 200 Cubans may land and
start working in Uganda’s hospitals, and the public will get used to
them. After all, the concept of ‘Ba-Cuba’ is a common, daily occurrence
here. The slight difference is that this time, the ‘bacuba’ will be real
Cubans.
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