In 2005, Chávez responded to criticisms of his health program and announced Barrio Adentro II, a plan to construct small hospital facilities called Integrated Diagnostics Centers (CDIs) and Integrated Rehabilitation Rooms (SRIs). Thirty of the facilities were inaugurated in June 2005, with another 600 planned over the next two years. Claudio Letelier, the Venezuelan director of the first clinic in Caricuao, was proud that “We offer a complete package of health services, all for free. In our hospital, we have departments for surgery, traumatology, dermatology, psychiatry, language therapy, dentistry, and cardiology.” While no Cubans worked in this hospital, the Barrio Adentro physicians both transfered patients to and communicated with the central facility. The director said that its popularity had already put the hospital “on the edge of our capacity limits,” but added that the opening of new clinics under the same program would ease the volume. The expansion of the principles of Barrio Adentro into these community clinics increased the services available to the population, but some critics objected that the program is weak, creating a substandard parallel health system instead of replacing the old system altogether.
The president responded to these additional criticisms with another dramatic plan. A month later, he announced Barrio Adentro III, a complete overhaul of all public Venezuelan hospitals. Chávez called the program a “hospital revolution,” but upgrading facilities with state-of-the-art medical equipment veers far from the mission of the original program. Still, the sheer cost of Barrio Adentro III indicates the willingness of the Venezuelan government to realize the original purpose of its health mission and to create, in Chávez’s words, “a true public health system in Venezuela for the first time in 200 years.”
At present, almost 30,000 Cuban doctors and other healthcare workers are living and working in Venezuela. The final task of Barrio Adentro is to replace them. Already, more Venezuelans, particularly young doctors, have entered the health mission. The Health Committee Coordination is a group of 800 Venezuelan doctors participating in Barrio Adentro I and II. Furthermore, 500 Venezuelan doctors were sent to Cuba for training in 2005, and by the end of the year, even greater numbers left to take their place. Within Venezuela, there is a debate over the length of medical training, now required to be six years. Some claim that the rush to train doctors may sacrifice quality, but it furthers the larger goal of making Barrio Adentro sustainable. For the first time, Venezuelans have a comprehensive health system that reaches them, and it is a right that the people do not want to lose. A year after the first Barrio Adentro mission opened, thousands of supporters celebrated in downtown Caracas as the president delivered the final speech of the event. The shouts of “Barrio no se va! Chávez no se va!” affirmed the immediate success of this radical vision and swore to preserve what it had made.
Austin Kilaru is a junior English major at Yale University.