Scottish Medical Aid is twinned with the Escambray region of south-central Cuba. Before 1959, this mountainous area supported a dispersed rural population engaged primarily in coffee and subsistence farming. Income was supplemented by seasonal work outside the zone in harvesting tobacco and sugar cane, but living standards were generally poor. There was scant provision of electricity or piped water. Rudimentary communication systems meant few inhabitants had easy access to medical and education services.

After the 1959 revolution, an extensive road-building and electrification programme accompanied the formation of small modern communities provided with schools and other social amenities. Rural Clinics, local hospitals and a network of family doctors provided free medical services for all,radically improving public health in general and infant mortality in particular. Since 1989, acute import shortages have threatened these gains. There have been cuts in supplies of key pharmaceutical products to local clinics and hospitals. Rural communities are also especially vulnerable to disruptions of electric power and transport.

Within the Escambray region, Scottish Medical Aid is linked directly with the public health authorities of the Municipality of Fomento. These serve the local population (see map) and support the extensive network of family doctors that live there. Scottish Medical Aid purchases, or obtains by voluntary donation, the pharmaceutical products directly requested of it by the health authorities of this region and two or more shipments of these prioritised items are delivered each year. Since 2002, significant consignments of key medical supplies have also been provided for the Provincial Children's Hospital of Sancti-Spiritus.These have included not only basic pharmaceutical supplies but a significant range of surgical items and other medical equipment and an abdominal ultrasound scanner was delivered to the Municipal Hospital of Fomento. The Provincial Children’s Hospital is an important pediatric teaching hospital for the region and beyond and since 2006, in addition to funding the establishment of a specialist cystic fibrosis ward, we have upgraded the hospital’s failing I.T. system with computers and necessary consumables. Our provision of comprehensive audio-visual teaching packages has also improved the hospital’s pediatric teaching facilities. In addition, the proven expertise of Scottish Medical Aid in the purchase and secure delivery of medical products has been placed at the disposition of other charities, facilitating, for example, the delivery of 1,000 anti-asthmatic inhalers and other supplies urgently needed by the Special School for Asthmatic and Diabetic Children at Tarará, Havana Province. Finally, since 2007, significant individual donations have been directed to support Cuba’s key role in “Operation Miracle” which has now carried out more than one million free sight-saving operations in the Caribbean and Central America.

In these various ways, Scottish Medical Aid’s activities, although inevitably limited, alleviate difficulties in public health provision in a tangible and accountable form to identifiable communities with clear needs

See Map of Region Here