Global Policy Forum

By Jim Veverka

Until recently, Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick worked as a physician at the Veterans Administration medical center in Tampa, Florida, where he directed the hospital's chronic pain program. There, he was praised by his supervisors for devoting "considerable energies to the human rights field, where he has an international reputation for defending victims of government policies." But when those considerable energies expose the State Department's role in concealing the disastrous impact of the US embargo on Cube-well, that's a different story.

In 1993, Kirkpatrick went to Cuba to do research. "I wanted to see how a health care system would operate in Communist country," he says.

In Cuba, Kirkpatrick was surprised to witness an epidemic of neurological disease caused by a food shortage. More than 50,000 Cubans were experiencing symptoms ranging from blindness and deafness to burning sensations in their hands and feet and loss of bowel and bladder control. Doctors, lacking sensation in their hands, were unable to perform surgery. Perhaps most troubling was the fact that no one knew precisely why all of this was happening.

Upon returning to the United States, Kirkpatrick, who also is an assistant professor of anesthesiology a the University of South Florida, began to analyze the health crisis and concluded that its primary cause was the US embargo. With the help of his supervisor, Dr. Robert Bedford, Kirkpatrick published his findings in the Nov. 30, 1996 issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal. He wrote that the US embargo and "the resultant lack of food and medicine to Cuba contributed to the worst epidemic of neurological disease this century."

This disease, Kirkpatrick says, is identical to the syndrome found among American GIs who faced starvation in Japanese POW camps during World War II. Describing the syndrome as a "zone" that one passes through - "the twilight between dying and living" - Kirkpatrick explains that a vitamin deficiency produces progressively more severe neurological symptoms, ranging from anxiety and nervousness to the devastating symptoms he saw in Cuba.

"I thought that would be enough - to publish that there was a crime against humanity being perpetrated by the United States, my own country, against people 90 miles away," he says.

It wasn't. In May 1997, the State Department released a press statement disputing Kirkpatrick's claims and blaming the crisis on the Castro government's "continued adherence to a discredited communist economic model."

"I was reading this and I said to myself, 'My God, they just flat lied,' " Kirkpatrick says. He contacted the State Department, requesting that they verify their information or retract their press statement, but to no avail.

Then, in April 1998, while writing a report challenging the State Department, requested by then Rep. Esteban Torres (D-Calif ), Kirkpatrick stopped by Bedford's office to discuss the article. Brushing aside Kirkpatrick's search as "extracurricular," Bedford informed him that the VA would not be renewing his contract.

Kirkpatrick says his dismissal came as "huge, huge surprise." He had tenure at the VA and consistently had received high ratings for his research on the embargo. His 1998 evaluation pointed out: "Dr. Kirkpatrick's medical publications regarding the public health situation in Cuba have received favorable notice in both the U.S. ate and House of Representatives, and have served as the foundation for legislative action designed to relieve the US embargo against Cuba."

After examining Kirkpatrick's case, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a public interest law firm that assists whistleblowers, filed suit under Whistleblower Protection Act with U.S. Office of Special Counsel. GAP legal director Tom Devine describes Kirkpatrick's suit as a test case to see if the government's own whistle-blowing mechanism can confront "big lies about foreign policy outrages." In addition to challenging Kirkpatrick's termination from the Tampa VA hospital, Devine is pursuing "a whistle-blowing disclosure that the State Department misstated the public health consequences of the Cuan medical embargo."

Meanwhile, Kirkpatrick continues to speak out about the harm the embargo inflicts on the Cuban people. "I don't want the American public to think I've been duped. I had no particular political persuasion - other than a strict adherence to scientifically verifiable data," he says. "You're a witness to a crime. You can walk away, or you can do something about it."

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