Latin America

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Young victims continue to receive treatment in Cuba two decades after Ukrainian nuclear disaster

Andres Schipani in Tarara
Thu 2 Jul 2009 13.51 EDT

Eleven-year-old Olga enters the beach house in flip-flops, her hair still wet from a dip in the Caribbean. "I really like it here," she says. "The food is great, the beach is awesome. I made some fantastic friends."

A typical child's reaction to a beach holiday, perhaps – only this is no ordinary seaside break. Olga is a Ukrainian "Chernobyl child", in Cuba not for a holiday but to undergo intensive medical treatment with some of the country's best doctors. She goes to school along with 180 other Ukrainian children. "I miss some bits of my home town," she muses. "But I don't ever want to leave."

Olga is one of more than 18,000 Ukrainian children to have been treated over the years at the Tarara facility near the Cuban capital, Havana. The programme was set up in 1990 to treat the victims of the world's most devastating nuclear accident four years earlier.

A steady procession of children with bald heads, skin lesions and other malformations have since benefited from splashing in the clear blue Caribbean waters. Twenty-three years after Chernobyl, the Cuban programme is still going strong. Remarkably, children born years after the disaster still suffer physical consequences of the meltdown that irradiated large parts of Ukraine and Belarus; equally remarkably, despite isolation and economic miasma, Cuba still manages to tend to them.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/cuba-chernobyl-health-children

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The Little Known Story/History of the Chernobyl Children Cured in Cuba
ENVIRONMENT, ENERGY, BALKANS AND EASTERN EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, SCIENCE, COOPS-COOPERATION-SHARING, HEALTH, HISTORY, 8 Jul 2019

Miguel Faure Polloni | Resumen – TRANSCEND Media Service

8 Jun 2019 – While the new four part HBO documentary about the 1986 nuclear power plant meltdown in Chernobyl is being viewed by millions a related story of human dignity and solidarity that was omitted also needs to be told.

The disaster that started on April 26, 1986, at reactor No. 4 of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power station in Ukraine, resulted in a wide array of painful radioactive related conditions to thousands of children living in the area where the nuclear disaster took place.

In 1990, the Cuban Government headed by Fidel Castro decided to aid the victims by taking the town of Tarara, an ex seaside resort for the country’s bourgeoisie and military elite during the Batista dictatorship, in eastern Havana and turning it into a real hospital and treatment city. In addition to the clinical facilities for those affected – which included two hospitals and some 20 medical branches in the professional category – the small city had a theatre, several schools and recreational areas stretching out over almost two kilometres of crystal-clear beaches.

The Tarará pediatric hospital treated more than 25,000 children, accompanied by their families, who were victims of the tragedy from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, most of them had thyroid cancer and leukemia since they had been exposed to iodine-131 or caesium-137. They also suffered from deformities, muscular atrophy, skin disease, and stomach problems. Along with all that most of the children suffered from post traumatic stress caused by experiencing the nuclear horror.

Cuban doctors Julio Medina, who coordinated the program for years, and Omar Garcia, researcher at the Center for Radiation Protection and Hygiene, divided the patients into four groups. It entailed staying on the Island between 45 days and several months depending on the seriousness of their condition. Cuban doctors, teachers and social workers took care of the Chernobyl children at the facility from 1990 to 2011.

More:
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2019/07/the-little-known-story-history-of-the-chernobyl-children-cured-in-cuba/