MANAGUA, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Cuba plans to send doctors and medicine to Nicaragua, extending its so-called medical diplomacy to the new government of leftist President Daniel Ortega, a longtime ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Cuba's top diplomat in Nicaragua, Manuel Guillot, said on Wednesday the doctors would work along the Caribbean coast, the most impoverished part of a country second only to Haiti as the poorest in the Americas.

He gave no more details but said the region had been "effectively abandoned in terms of sanitation."

Castro, who has been seriously ill since intestinal surgery last year, has sent tens of thousands of Cuban doctors and dentists to help the poor in other nations, helping win friends for his communist government.

Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla, was a close ally of Castro during the 1980s, when he led a Sandinista government that fought U.S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua's fierce civil war.

Cuba backed Ortega's ambitious adult literacy drive after the Sandinistas took power in a 1979 revolution, although the civil war and a U.S. blockade eventually wrecked the economy.

Ortega won Nicaragua's presidential election last November, completing a remarkable comeback more than 16 years after voters threw him out of office.

Cuba has a large contingent of doctors working in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez is Castro's strongest regional ally. Others have been sent to Bolivia in support of leftist President Evo Morales.

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