Posted on 04/10/2005 6:22:29 PM PDT by wagglebee
Listening to the New York Times or Hollywood's contingent of wide-eyed Castro worshippers you'd get the idea that medical care in Castro's Cuba makes America's healthcare system look like a third world system.
Such claims are pure myth.
Dr. Hilda Molina, one of Cuba's top neurosurgeons, a one-time member of the Cuban parliament, and a confidant of Fidel Castro, made the mistake of criticizing her nation's medical care system.
Molina exposed Cuba's two-tier medical system that enabled rich foreigners to come in for treatment at first-class facilities in Cuba, paying in dollars, while ordinary Cubans got some of the most atrocious medical care on the planet.
According to The American Thinker magazine, Molina was seriously punished for her revelations, as well as objecting to Castro's fetal stem-cell research program on the grounds of conscience.
In the end, she lost her job, her parliament position, her livelihood and everything she'd worked for.
"Last December, she tried to leave Cuba to visit her Argentinian son, his wife and their children," the Thinker reported. "There was a showdown at the Argentinian Embassy and much to its disgrace, the Argentines refused to give her a visa, shoving her back to Castro's waiting agents on the outside. Nothing has been heard from her since."
Dr. Molina was not alone in decrying the shabby state of medical care inflicted on ordinary Cubans under Castro. The American Thinker cited a Cuban source that took on the issue head-on.
Wrote the Cuban source, babalublog.com "Every single time the island of Cuba and Fidel Castro's revolution are covered anywhere in the media, one of the points always mentioned is Cuba's free healthcare. You can practically time it. If it's in print, you get the lead issue in the first and second paragraph, a mention of Fidel Castro or one of his cronies in the third paragraph, and then the plug for the lauded free healthcare available to Cubans in the fourth. I don’t think I've ever read an article about Castro or Cuba where the 'healthcare' isn’t mentioned.
"Every single Castro supporter clings to this healthcare thing like it is some kind of holy grail. In a debate, the fact that Cuba has the most political prisoners in the world is ignored. The fact that Cubans on the island lack even the most basic of necessities is ignored. Tourism apartheid is ignored. Everything is ignored save for the free healthcare and 100% literacy.
"Of course, none of these 'free healthcare!' cheerleaders have ever been to a Cuban hospital. They've never been to a Cuban clinic. Hospitals and clinics serving the average Cuban, that is."
The writer then published photographs showing cockroach-infested hospital rooms: "Cockroaches. Twenty-seven of them to be exact. All swept together after having been squashed by patients and patrons of El Hospital Clinico Quirurgico de la Habana."
Other photos showed a hospital interior that would be shut down in the U.S. because of its shockingly unsanitary conditions.
"Well," wrote the source, "this is just a small reality of Castro's lauded healthcare in Cuba. This is a hospital in Havana, one Castro once called 'one of the most modern and best ones in the country.' The hospital is in the nation's capital and the most populated city in the country. Imagine the conditions of hospitals in smaller cities or rural areas."
Moreover "this is not a hospital that caters to foreigners. This is a hospital strictly for the Cuban people. Foreigners are treated quite differently and their facilities are state of the art and, at least, sanitary.
The photos, taken by two journalists, María Elena Morejón and Carlos Wotzkow, can be accessed through babalublog.com. Wrote the source, "I urge each and every one of you to check the ... photographs so that next time, when some Fidel-loving apologist mentions Cuba's free healthcare, you remember what they're really talking about: the myth of Cuba's vaunted healthcare system."
"Every single Castro supporter clings to this healthcare thing like it is some kind of holy grail. In a debate, the fact that Cuba has the most political prisoners in the world is ignored. The fact that Cubans on the island lack even the most basic of necessities is ignored. Tourism apartheid is ignored. Everything is ignored save for the free healthcare and 100% literacy.
"Of course, none of these 'free healthcare!' cheerleaders have ever been to a Cuban hospital. They've never been to a Cuban clinic. Hospitals and clinics serving the average Cuban, that is."
I wish there was a way to allow all of Castro's leftist apologists spend a few months in a Cuban gulag and then see how they feel.
Of course it's a sham...Cuba, after all, is a country-sized Communist prison camp.
Duh! I am shocked, shocked, I tell you, to discover commies and their leftie stooges here are liars.
Yep, and their supposedly "great health care system for the masses" has none of the emergency care infrastructure we and the rest of the free world take for granted - no ambulances, no EMTs, no way to get to the hospital for most people. Well not exactly - normally your neighbors will try to round up a donkey cart to pull you to the hospital if you are having a heart attack. Sometimes the poor victim is even alive when he gets there.
Another myth busted.
ALL socialized medicine is a sham, not just what you find in Cuba. Cuba's just happens to be the worst because it's the most socialistic country in the world (except for No. Korea, whose health-care system consists of starving people to death).
bump.
That could be amusing. A "friend of a friend" was a Cuban apologist. She is an artist, and for years had claimed that Cuba and other Communist countries supported artists while America didn't.
She went to Cuba a few years ago to start her new life as an "appreciated artist", and found out that Cuba indeed supports artists; they just have to work long hours in factories painting gewgaws for tourists to buy.
PS. She's back here working as an art teacher and painting on her own time. She's doing well, and doesn't discuss politics anymore. :-)
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
If there is still a big Cuban connection with Angola, the Marburg outbreak there may test Cuban medicine somewhat.
Hola! Hope that doesn't happen, too clost to home.
Healthcare in Cuba is free, and worth every penny.
I'm an idiot, very fuzzy on my Cuba-Angola history, but I thought that Cubans had troops in Angola at one time...do you know, or does anyone, if they still are there? Because Luanda, Angolan capital, has Marburg cases, number unknown, and I know there's a flight direct from Luanda to Houston, how about from Luanda to Havana, too?
How do they come up with 100% literacy?
By killing all adults that are illiterate???
I just watched the documentary about Cuba by Oliver Stone and he makes himself look like a fool.He must be the only person who believes the people around him are acting freely instead of being told what to say by Castro.In his documentary there's not one Cuban on the street who doesn't love Castro and they all love living in Cuba.I saw another documentary by Stone about the Palestinians where he did the same thing.He interviewed terrorist and pretended like they were telling the truth.It's amazing how liberal beliefs can make such smart people so stupid.
Before Castro took power, Cuba had an increasing literacy rate already (no one is even sure why), the continuation has happened on his watch, so he gets credit.
If you are a true dictator, and you want 100% literacy, you should get it. If your using the schools to indoctrinate the population, you need the kids to be able to read your propaganda, and you can "hurt" those who do not learn to read.
If you were basically given the choices they are, one would have to be suicidal to not learn to read or make sure there kids could read. He is brutal, and the use of brutality is one way to achieve his ends. Everyone talks about 100% literacy, no one wants to ask how its being done.
They did and may still have troops there as Angola was a plum for Cuba; someone may have better information concerning that. Isolation with standard precautions works.
Whenever I was in school, and had to hear about Cuba's great "health care system", I used to ask the most basic questions.
1)If its so great, shouldn't they have a library of patents for medicine and pharmaceuticals?
2)Shouldn't they be leaders in some kind of medical innovation?
3)Should bio-tech, or some kind of method of treatment or some kind of research be a famous product of theres or at least shouldn't they be leaders in these fields?
4)What is the biggest accomplishment Cuba's health care system has produced, medically, technique, surgery, or in any specific field, ever?
5)If Cuba had created or invented vaccines or cures for any diseases, say cancer, do you really think we wouldn't have dropped the embargo on them to get it?
One does not frequently hear of Cuba when discussing today's integrating global economy. Cuba appears isolated, politically and economically, mainly due to trade restrictions placed on it by the US in the 1960's. No wonder, says the author of this Straits Times article, the world is surprised to learn of Cuba's flourishing biotech industry which has contributed much to the field of biotechnology and medicine. Since its establishment in the mid-1980's, the Cuban biotech sector has developed a meningitis B vaccine, and today exports the world's most effective hepatitis B vaccine to more than 30 countries. Recently, it developed the first synthetic vaccine for the prevention of pneumonia and meningitis, which is much cheaper than what is offered by Western pharmaceutical companies. Poised to provide anti-cancer therapies to the European market by 2008, Cuba is also eagerly looking to enter the western market, and many observers are cheering it on. – YaleGlobal
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=3193
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