Gail Reed

Gail Reed

Gail Reed is a founder of Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba. She "was one of the top communists in the Venceremos Brigade".

About

Gail Reed was one of the top communists in the Venceremos Brigade (VB) leadership and continued on as career as a supporter of Communism, especially in Latin America and Cuba. She married ####, the top Cuban Secret Police operative from their DGI, and was captured along with her husband, by US forces who liberated the island of Grenada in 1983. Because her husband had "diplomatic immunity", she also claimed it and both were subsequently deported back to Cuba.

For specific details about Reed's activities in the VB, see "The Theory and Practice of Communism in 1972 (Venceremos Brigade), Part 2", Hearings, House Internal Security Committee (HISC), October 16, 18 & 19, 1972.

Ms. Reed received a Master of Science from Columbia University School of Journalism, New York (1976); and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Illinois (1969).

Cuban journalist

Gail Reed, M.S., is a journalist who serves as International Director of Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC), an Atlanta-based non-profit organization that develops programs bridging the US, Cuban and global medical, nursing and public health communities. She is Executive Editor of MEDICC Review, a quarterly journal on Cuban medicine and public health.

Ms. Reed has written on social and economic issues in Cuba for the last two decades. From 1993 to 1997, Ms. Reed regularly contributed to Business Week magazine, and from 1994 to 1996, was producer in Havana for NBC News.

Ms. Reed’s writings include: Denial of Food and Medicine: The Impact of the U.S. Embargo on Health and Nutrition in Cuba (1997, American Association for World Health, 300 pp.); Island in the Storm (1992, Ocean Press and the Center for Cuban Studies, 200 pp.); a series on women and race in Cuba; and numerous articles as contributing editor for Cuba Update, journal of the Center for Cuban Studies

MEDICC bio

Gail Reed, a founder of MEDICC, has written on social and economic issues in Cuba for the last two decades. Her writings include Denial of Food and Medicine: The Impact of the US Embargo on Health and Nutrition in Cuba; Island in the Storm; and a series on women and race in Cuba with Dr Johnnetta B. Cole. Ms Reed was most recently a featured speaker at TEDMED 2014 presenting on the Latin American Medical School. The video "Where to Train the World's Doctors? Cuba" is featured on TED.com. Ms Reed is also Co-Producer and Executive Producer of the award-winning film ¡Salud!, a feature documentary on Cuba and the quest for global health, released in January 2007 and distributed by MEDICC. In the 1990s, Ms. Reed regularly contributed to Business Week magazine, and was NBC News’ first Havana-based producer-correspondent since the early 1960s. She received her MS in Journalism from Columbia University, New York.

Honoring Fidel Castro

On November 26, 2016, Peter G. Bourne, Chair, MEDICC Board of Directors, Nassim Assefi, MEDICC Executive Director, Gail Reed, MEDICC Founding Director honored Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.

Verbatim from the Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba website in a tribute titled "MEDICC Remembers Fidel Castro as Leader of Health for All":

November 26, 2016 – Fidel Castro is gone, but his name still arouses passions over 60 years after his first appearance on the world political stage as a young rebel leader. In the debate swirling around his legacy, of two things there can be no doubt: while he was Cuban, he was also bigger than Cuba, the last of the larger-than-life giants of 20th century leadership.

And just as important, he was the driving force and main architect of universal health care in Cuba, a public health system responsible for making Cubans some of the healthiest people in the world. Built upon the notion of the right to health, he first outlined this vision in the program of the movement he led to victory on January 1, 1959.

As a result of his leadership, the new government dedicated itself first to health and education for all. In 1960-61, newly graduated doctors, backpacks in hand, headed for the countryside and mountains to take health care to people there for the first time, which coincided with a massive Literacy Campaign that taught some 700,000 Cubans to read and write.

Over the years, President Castro took an abiding interest in health and was at the forefront of promoting advances in health care, research and medical education: establishing rural hospitals and a national network of hundreds of community-based clinics, making prevention a cornerstone of training and service; generating extraordinary investments in biotechnology to develop novel vaccines and cancer therapies, and specialized services for Cuban newborns with heart disease. Finally, he considered the most significant “revolution within the revolution” to be the creation in the 1980s of the family doctor-and-nurse program, posting their offices on every block and farmland in Cuba.

The outcomes of these efforts were not achieved by one man, but by 500,000 Cuban health workers, who were able to count on health as a government priority. Together, they faced dengue and neuropathy epidemics; and the scarcity of medicines, including for HIV-AIDS patients, after the collapse of the socialist bloc and tightening of the US embargo on Cuba in the 1990s. Their dedication has won a healthier nation.

Under Fidel Castro’s leadership, Cuban health professionals also began volunteering to serve abroad as early as 1960, responders to earthquake-devastated Chile; and in 1963, the first long-term service was offered by doctors sent to newly independent Algeria.

Despite invasions and attempts on his own life, Fidel Castro continually demonstrated an attitude of openness towards the US people. He offered thousands of specially trained Cuban doctors to help New Orleans recover after Hurricane Katrina, a medical team named after Brooklyn-born Henry Reeve, a hero of Cuba’s independence war against Spain. He opened the scholarship doors of the Latin American School of Medicine to young, low-income US students, after a request from the Congressional Black Caucus. In his words, the school’s goal: “The doctors trained here should be the kind needed [by people] in the countryside, villages, marginalized neighborhoods and cities in the Third World. And also in immensely wealthy countries, such as the United States, where millions of African-Americans, Native Americans, Latino immigrants, Haitians and others, lack health care.” Since its opening in 1999, the Latin American School of Medicine has enrolled over 200 US students and graduated some 30,000 physicians from 100+ countries.

A MEDICC group of public health and medical educators was the last US delegation to meet with President Fidel Castro before his illness in July, 2006. As was customary, the gathering lasted for the whole night. But at the heart of our conversations was not global politics… but rather health, cochlear implants for blind-deaf Cuban children, a call to the Cuban medical team in East Timor, even the potential for US-Cuba cooperation in health and medicine. For 12 hours, health was at the top of our mutual agenda.

We can only hope that, going forward, the US-Cuba cooperation in health envisioned during that long night– and later ratified by Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro– can endure and expand, to benefit people in both our countries.

To the Cuban people, to Fidel Castro’s family, we extend our heartfelt condolences and appreciation for his life-long dedication to health worldwide.

• Peter G. Bourne, Chair, MEDICC Board of Directors
• Nassim Assefi, MEDICC Executive Director
• Gail Reed, MEDICC Founding Director

"Havana Note"

John McAuliff is Executive Director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development and a contributor, in 2009, to the website Havana Note, with Steve Clemons, Larry Wilkerson, Patrick Doherty, Anya Landau French, Jake Colvin, Sarah Stephens, Phil Peters, Timothy Punke, and Gail Reed.

"Cuba-U.S.: A healthy relationship"

Cooperation in matters of health and medical research can be one of the most solid roads to rapprochement between two countries that are still very distant. For more than 20 years, a U.S. organization seeks to generate synergies in a sphere where both nations show remarkable results.

It is called Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC). Located in Oakland, Calif., it brings together dozens of health professionals from all over the country.

Gail Reed

“We can’t close our eyes to the differences that exist, but our organization has the privilege of being in one of the fields where the benefits of cooperation exceed the hostility,” says Gail Reed, a Chicago journalist who, from her office in the Havana neighborhood of Santos Suárez, writes for MEDICC Review, a quarterly that translates into English the articles and research papers by doctors from Cuba and other countries.

“Collaboration between the two countries is not just a good idea, it’s indispensable!” emphasizes Gail Reed, who gives an example of what, in her opinion, has been the most substantial benefit for the U.S. of the exchanges promoted by MEDICC.

“Under our Community Alliance for Equity in Health, local leaders from Los Angeles, Oakland, Albuquerque and the Bronx determined their health problems and traveled to Cuba to exchange ideas with colleagues who were treating the same disorders, such as obesity, diabetes and teen pregnancy.

“Those exchanges brought forth ideas. For example, representatives from Oakland saw a family doctor in every neighborhood and wondered, ‘Why can’t we have doctors at our Fire Departments or in churches? We don’t have to build anything, just revise the local budget and bring the services closer to the people.’ And that’s what has been done,” Reed says.

Ever since the creation in Havana of the Latin-American School of Medicine, MEDICC has provided support for the training of the students. It does so because it is interested in accompanying the young Americans who receive scholarships to study there.

As of 2015, some 250 young Americans with limited resources have matriculated for free in that institution, making a commitment to care for the disadvantaged communities in their homeland. The number of graduates is on the rise.

“Our help consists of finding them mentors who will keep them ‘connected’ with the U.S. health-care system during their studies,” Reed explains. “We also finance, partially or totally, the boards [exams] that determine access to medical residency in the United States. Those tests cost about $2,000 and more than 90 percent of the students come from low-income families and racial and ethnic minorities that can’t afford that much,” Reed says.

The good will demonstrated by the NGO has earned it much prestige among Cuban professionals. Pedro Urra, the founder and longtime director of INFOMED, the Health Ministry’s computer network, defines it as “a serious and responsible channel […] because it has visualized the reality of Cuban public health and has brought experts from both countries together in a climate of respect and dialogue.”

That value is what the organization wants to use to promote binational agreements.

“We’re expecting the visit to Havana in April of two groups of members of the American Association of Public Health, whom we helped to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Cuban Public Health Society,” Reed says.”