SA’s fascination with Cuba continues
Are Cuban engineers here to teach us how to cope when our infrastructure implodes?
SA’s fascination with Cuba continues.There are Cuban doctors working in SA hospitals. Defence force personnel have apparently had unspecified military training in Cuba — which, among other things, involved sending one of the air force’s few remaining C-130 Hercules transport aircraft on a costly courier job to Havana last year to pick up some of their kit. The names of more than 2,000 Cubans, killed in Angola between 1975 and 1989, are on the memorial wall at Freedom Park in Pretoria.Now 24 Cuban water engineers, who have been here since August, are on a R64m mission to fix SA’s water infrastructure.That we are only hearing about it now gives off the same sort of pungency as a bunged-up sewage pipe.The doctors came because Cuba once had one of the best health-care systems in the world. The soldiers came to fight.But why the engineers, when there are hundreds of unemployed SA water engineers scratching for work?Cuba is also in the grip of a prolonged water crisis. The government wan...
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