A Comparative Study on Determinants of Foreign Policy: Cuban Medical Diplomacy and Venezuelan Oil Diplomacy

Abstract

Oil-for-Doctors program, implemented between Venezuela and Cuba, has received high attention as one of the representative resource exchange diplomacy. This agreement called for Cubas provision of medical resources, including medical professionals, health clinics and among other things, in exchange for Venezuelas supply of petroleum at fixed number of barrels per day. Cubas medical diplomacy has been praised for furnishing full medical scholarships to ELAM for the young from other countries, offering health care service to developing countries and executing emergency relief in disaster areas in terms of the claim of medical internationalism . Venezuela has been implemented its oil diplomacy to promote the Venezuela-based integration of LACs and pursuit the uni-polar system popularizing the anti-Americanism by providing its oil to neighbor countries at preferential price. The main purpose of the thesis is to examine the determinants of the Cuban medical diplomacy and the Venezuelan oil diplomacy focusing on four variables, individual variable, governmental variable, systemic variable and societal variable, of Rosenau`s Pre-theory. I would like to verify how those variables affected the policy-making of both diplomacies by implementing the comparative analysis. Then, the current collapse of Venezuelan oil diplomacy would be examined on why its diplomacy faced crisis whereas Cuban medical diplomacy has been smoothly expanded by analyzing the change of variable.