WHEN FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER visited Cuba in May, he spoke at the University of Havana about his vision of “a Cuba fully integrated into a democratic hemisphere, participating in a free trade area of the Americas, and with our citizens traveling without restraint to visit each other.”

Carter urged the United States Congress to ease the four-decade-long economic embargo with the island nation. But he also encouraged Cubans to embrace the ideals of a democracy. “It is based on some simple premises,” he said. “All citizens are born with the right to choose their own leaders; to define their own destiny; to speak freely; to organize political parties, trade unions, and non-governmental groups; and to have fair and open trials.”

Carter, along with his wife, Rosalynn, and associates from the fields of medicine, public health, politics, science, and academia, have worked ceaselessly to promote not only democracy, but also peace, health, and improved living conditions around the globe since establishing the Carter Center, in partnership with Emory University, in Atlanta in 1982.

“I thought it would be a little adjunct to the [presidential] library, a small replication of Camp David, where we could act as a mediator,” Carter said at the center’s twentieth anniversary luncheon in March. “Now, more than half our work is in health care and agriculture. It has far exceeded anything Rosalynn and I ever imagined it could be.”

Carter admits that his time in the White House lends clout when he visits other world leaders. “I’ve been president of a great country,” he says. “I usually don’t have a problem getting an appointment.”

In turn, the Carter Center, adjacent to the Carter Presidential Library and Museum on Freedom Parkway near downtown Atlanta, often plays host to foreign dignitaries and international conference delegates.

The center’s mission of “waging peace, fighting disease, and building hope” is supported by grants from governments, foundations, and individuals worldwide and is carried out by 150 full-time staff, including former ambassadors and seasoned academics, and more than a hundred interns, on an annual budget of $35 million.

When not traveling the world, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, who serve as chair and vice chair of the center’s board of trustees respectively, divide their time between their home in Plains, Georgia, and their residence at the Carter Center. They take pride in seeing tangible evidence of the center’s programs.

“On our visits in Africa, we’ll drive past field after field of corn, and each field has a sign that says Global 2000,” Rosalynn Carter said. “Of course, those were put up for us, but they were nice to see.”

Agricultural efforts focus on increasing self-sufficiency, such as the Sasakawa-Global 2000 program that worked with ministries of agriculture in twelve nations to help four million small-scale farmers in Africa double and triple their yields of maize, corn, wheat, and other grains. Improved growing methods have resulted in a 500 percent increase in wheat production in five years in the Sudan and have allowed Ethiopia to export maize for the first time to drought-stricken Kenya.

The center also battles tropical diseases in Third World countries and has almost eradicated the painful, parasitic Guinea worm. “Through an international coalition, 98 percent of all Guinea worm cases have been eliminated, but serious challenges remain,” Carter says. Most remaining cases exist in the Sudan, where health workers struggle to distribute water filters and educate villagers despite an ongoing civil war.

The River Blindness program, along with Merck pharmaceuticals, has provided 35 million free treatments of preventative Mectizan tablets to people in Africa and Latin America at risk for onchocerciasis, a disease spread by the bite of black flies no bigger than Georgia gnats, and trachoma, a blinding disease also spread by flies. Efforts to combat schistosomiasis (“snail fever”), in which parasites invade the bladder, and lymphatic filariasis (“elephantiasis”), which causes dramatic swelling of a victim’s arms, legs, and genitals, are expanding, especially in Nigeria.

Politically, the center assists in negotiations between warring factions, monitors elections, safeguards human rights, and protects and encourages emerging democracies. In Haiti, Carter helped negotiate the return of the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1994. The center’s Americas Program seeks ways to deepen relationships between North America and other countries in the Western hemisphere, such as Cuba, and the Democracy Program strives to ensure representational leadership and a free and fair vote for all. Workers have observed about three dozen elections in more than twenty countries, from the rural village of Zhujiaqiao, China, to the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. “Building hope is what people all around the world will tell you when you ask them what an election means,” says Chuck Costello, director of the Democracy Program.

Rosalynn Carter has led efforts to bring awareness to the epidemic of depression and other mental illnesses through mental health journalism fellowships, a task force that works to reduce stigma and discrimination against the mentally ill, and an annual symposium on mental health policy. The Rosalynn Carter Endowed Chair in Mental Health was established in 1998 at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. “Our message is that mental illnesses are treatable, that treatment is cost-effective, and that failure to treat needlessly and tragically wastes lives,” she says.

Despite the Center’s victories, Jimmy Carter says non-governmental organizations can’t shoulder these burdens alone. “Our country gives one one-thousandth of our gross national product to humanitarian aid–the lowest percentage of any industrialized nation,” he says. “We need to do more.”–M.J.L.

To find out more about the Carter Center, go to www.cartercenter.org.

Learn more about the Rollins School of Public Health’s recent trip to Cuba.