US doctors to join Cuban medical team in Haiti

In a rare show of cooperation between Washington and Havana, Cuba granted US military planes overflight rights allowing quicker move of aid.

HAVANA, February 5, 2010 (AFP) - Eight US medical graduates will join a Cuban team of over 1,000 doctors and paramedics Friday to assist victims of Haiti's devastating earthquake, officials said.

The move would be a notable one for the United States and Cuba, which have no diplomatic relations and have been at loggerheads for half a century.

In a rare show of cooperation between Washington and Havana, Cuba granted US military planes overflight rights in the immediate aftermath of the quake, allowing aid to be brought from Miami more quickly.

The Americans joining the communist island nation's medical mission in Haiti are graduates of the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, the Foreign Ministry said.

They will begin their work at the Croix-des-Bouquets hospital in a northern suburb of the devastated capital Port-au-Prince.

According to the Foreign Ministry, the Cuban medical team has cared for 60,790 Haitians so far and performed 3,548 surgeries.

The massive June 12 tremor has killed 212,000 people, injured over 300,000 and left far more than one million homeless, according to Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

Bellerive told CNN on Thursday that the toll, already the highest on record from any natural disaster in the Americas, was likely to rise "a little bit" higher as recovery crews pull bodies from locations where demolition had been delayed while rescue teams searched for survivors.

The official Cubadebate website meanwhile said that Cuba would soon open a fifth hospital in the southwestern Haitian town of Les Cayes.

In signing a book commemorating the victims of temblor on Tuesday at the Haitian embassy in Cuba, President Raul Castro said the Cuban medical team would remain in Haiti as long as necessary and "years if needed."