Cuba to Help Caribbean Fight AIDS

Cuba offered on Thursday to build training centers
for nurses to handle AIDS patients in Caribbean nations and provide
antiretroviral drugs to fight the pandemic.
Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque made the offer at a one-day
meeting with counterparts from the Caribbean Community (Caricom).

"From the social standpoint, the major challenge ahead of us is the
fight against HIV/AIDS," Perez Roque said.

In contrast to other Caribbean countries, Cuba has contained the spread
of the virus to 0.07 percent of its people through a controversial
program that obliged patients to remain in institutions to obtain treatment.

In Haiti, the poorest nation in the region, 5.6 percent of the
population have been infected, according to U.N. figures.

Cuba has developed cheap generic antiretroviral drugs and offered them
to other developing nations and sent hundreds of doctors to work in
other countries.

Perez Roque said economic ties between Cuba and the 15-member regional
Caricom bloc, whose members include Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad, had not
developed sufficiently, despite a trade agreement signed four years ago.

He thanked Caribbean nations for consistently opposing U.S. trade
sanctions against Cuba and helping break the diplomatic isolation of the
communist-run island sought by Washington. (Reuters)