The Myth of Cuban Health Care | Reason - Daniel Raisbeck & John Osterhoudt:
April 8, 2022 - "'If there's one thing they do right in Cuba, it's health care,' said Michael Moore in a 2007 interview. 'Cuba has the best health care system in the entire area,' according to Angela Davis, 'and in many respects much better than the U.S.' 'One thing that is well established in the global health community is the strength of the Cuban national health system,' said Clare Wenham, a professor at the London School of Economics. Claims like these have appeared in hundreds of documentaries, newspaper articles, and magazine features.... It's a testament to the effectiveness of the Castro regime's propaganda apparatus that this myth, so deeply at odds with reality, has persisted for so long.
"'The Cuban health care system is destroyed,' Rotceh Rios Molina, a Cuban doctor who escaped the country's medical mission while stationed in Mexico, tells Reason in Spanish. 'The doctor's offices are in very bad shape.' 'People are dying in the hallways,' says José Angel Sánchez, another Cuban doctor who defected from the medical mission in Venezuela, interviewed by Reason in Spanish.
According to Rios, Sánchez, and others with firsthand experience practicing medicine in Cuba, the island nation's health care system is a catastrophe. Clinics lack the most routine supplies, from antibiotics to oxygen and even running water, and their hallways are often occupied by ailing patients because there aren't enough doctors to treat their most basic needs. Cuban hospitals are unsanitary and decrepit. It's exactly what you'd expect in a country impoverished by communism.
"The only thing that's changed is that because of social media and the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's propaganda facade has finally started to shatter. And yet in 2021, some journalists were falling for the claim that the Cuban government had set the model in its response to COVID-19. By July of that year, ordinary Cubans had taken to the streets — and to Twitter and Facebook — in part to call attention to what the pandemic had actually meant for Cuban hospitals and clinics. In the 15 years since the release of Michael Moore's documentary Sicko, which celebrated Cuban health care, everyday citizens have been armed with smartphones, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, empowering them to tell the truth about what it's really like to walk into a Cuban hospital.
"So how did the Castro regime's propaganda machine manage to fool so many for so long? According to Maria Werlau, executive director of the Cuba Archive, the answer lies with Cuba's foreign medical missions, which are teams of health care professionals dispatched to provide emergency and routine care to foreign countries. The first medical mission was sent to Algeria in 1963. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the government lost its major source of aid, the program was ramped up significantly as a source of revenue for the impoverished nation. The Cuban government has promoted the missions as a humanitarian endeavor, and a demonstration of the community spirit and selflessness central to the communist project....
"The myth of Cuban physicians as selfless healers started to fracture in 2000 when two doctors from the mission in Zimbabwe slipped a note to an airline official with the handwritten word kidnapped. They had denounced the Castro regime and were being brought back to Cuba against their will, possibly to face jail time. Instead, they wound up in the U.S. and were granted political asylum.... In 2006, the George W. Bush administration created the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, granting health care workers stationed abroad permanent resident status. All they had to do was make it to a U.S. embassy. Over 7,000 medical workers took advantage of the program.... In 2018, a group of Cuban doctors who defected from the medical missions sued the Pan American Health Organization, which is part of the World Health Organization, for aiding in human trafficking and for earning $75 million in fees by acting as a middle man'....
"When defenders of Cuban health care acknowledge its deficiencies at all, they usually point the finger at the U.S. trade embargo, which has been in place since 1962. But the deplorable conditions in Cuban hospitals have more to do with a lack of basic health care supplies, which are readily available from other countries, such as antibiotics and steroids. Cuban hospitals also have a shortage of beds and stretchers, and some were without water for six to 12 hours a day at the height of the pandemic....
"Despite reports early in the pandemic that Cuba was an outlier in its success in combating COVID-19, by August of 2021 The New York Times was reporting that Cuba's health care system was 'reeling,' with oxygen supplies running low, a shortage of syringes, and mortuaries and crematories 'overwhelmed.' Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed the U.S. trade embargo."
Read more: https://reason.com/video/2022/04/18/the-myth-of-cuban-health-care/
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