Washington, November 6 (RHC)-- An article published in the U.S. magazine The New Yorker says that Cuba is the country with a first-level response to the international Ebola crisis.

Entitled “Cuba's Ebola Diplomacy” and written by journalist Jon Lee Anderson, the article stresses the significant contribution by Cuba to the fight against Ebola, even more than developed countries like the United States, the UK and China.

“All of these countries are following the lead of Cuba,” reads the article, adding that the island “has long been known for its roving teams of medical doctors and nurses. Indeed, Cuba, an island nation of eleven million people, with 83,000 trained doctors –- one of the highest proportions of doctors in the world.”

Anderson also said that when Cuban authorities requested volunteers to fight Ebola in Western Africa, over 15,000 professionals offered to go, including intensive care doctors and nurses. He recalled that Cuba sent hundreds of doctors to Pakistan in the aftermath of the 2005 quake that hit that nation as well as to Haiti following a devastating earthquake in 2010.

“There are an estimated 50,000 Cuban doctors working in slums and rural areas in as many as thirty other developing nations around the world,” the journalist noted, while also referring to the hundreds of thousands of students from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States who are taking medical courses at Havana’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM).

And as to Cuba’s assistance to Africa now, Anderson says: “Cuba’s out-sized gesture in West Africa has not gone unnoticed, and may pave the way for the start of some Ebola diplomacy between Havana and Washington.”

You can read The New Yorker article at: http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cubas-ebola-diplomacy