<story><title>In the medical response to Ebola, Cuba is punching above its weight</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/04/in-the-medical-response-to-ebola-cuba-is-punching-far-above-its-weight/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VLM</author><text>Decades ago Cuba made training and exporting medical personnel their &amp;quot;thing&amp;quot; and they ended up owning that part of the world market despite being a small and very poor country.&lt;p&gt;There is a direct tech analogy with Finland and cell phones.&lt;p&gt;From the small country PoV, if you can&amp;#x27;t compete in the strategic nuclear bomber world market, or the manufacturing robot world market, you can probably find some market segment, however small, to focus on and take over.  Like cellphones, or 3rd world medical care.&lt;p&gt;Other countries could, and probably will, do the same.&lt;p&gt;There is the interesting analogy that Finland isn&amp;#x27;t doing so well in the post Nokia, iphone and android world.  Wonder what could happen to Cuba if the demand for docs dried up (optimistically due to 3rd world advancing into training their own medical workers, and not by the entire 3rd world dying of ebola or in ensuing strife after the epidemic)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>will_brown</author><text>Cuba&amp;#x27;s healthcare niche is not necessarily limited to 3rd world medical care.  Throughout the US&amp;#x2F;Cuba embargo the US had routinely carved out an exception to trade for Cuba&amp;#x27;s cancer&amp;#x2F;anti-cancer medications which have been viewed as cutting edge for over a decade.  So perhaps another niche 1st world cancer research and treatments.</text></comment>
<story><title>In the medical response to Ebola, Cuba is punching above its weight</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/04/in-the-medical-response-to-ebola-cuba-is-punching-far-above-its-weight/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VLM</author><text>Decades ago Cuba made training and exporting medical personnel their &amp;quot;thing&amp;quot; and they ended up owning that part of the world market despite being a small and very poor country.&lt;p&gt;There is a direct tech analogy with Finland and cell phones.&lt;p&gt;From the small country PoV, if you can&amp;#x27;t compete in the strategic nuclear bomber world market, or the manufacturing robot world market, you can probably find some market segment, however small, to focus on and take over.  Like cellphones, or 3rd world medical care.&lt;p&gt;Other countries could, and probably will, do the same.&lt;p&gt;There is the interesting analogy that Finland isn&amp;#x27;t doing so well in the post Nokia, iphone and android world.  Wonder what could happen to Cuba if the demand for docs dried up (optimistically due to 3rd world advancing into training their own medical workers, and not by the entire 3rd world dying of ebola or in ensuing strife after the epidemic)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>What I thought was most interesting in the Cuba case was how little technology it takes to train Doctors.  Outside of surgery Doctors tend to have other people doing the high tech hands on work like operating an MRI or Doing blood-work.  But, as they training people to operate in the 3rd world even surgery tends to be fairly low tech.&lt;p&gt;In reality it&amp;#x27;s the opportunity costs that makes training doctors so expensive.  So, in many ways less developed nations have a huge cost advantage when supplying doctors.  The real issue is after exporting them they probably don&amp;#x27;t send all that much money back home.</text></comment>