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."
Its kind of hard to imply something is a secret if its available in more then 30 countries, never the less, if its developing such vaccines, it wouldn't have problems using the profits of licensing them to others to bring in cash.
If Cuba is isolated economically, producing cures, is the easiest way to break it. The question here is how much of this is hype and how much of it isn't? Poised to provide anti-cancer therapies by 2008? I'll believe it when it happens, for a country that has had Castro and his vision around for so long and has established a bio-tech sector in the mid-80's, they should not be doing catch up, they should be the world leaders.
No one finds it odd, that Cuba which is supposed to be isolated, makes it claims of success, with proof, that they are not isolated (references to over 30 countries, European markets, western market?).
This is a cheerleader puff piece where the author did not have to good sense to avoid contradicting themselves.
You make a lot of sense to me!
"Cuba's accomplishments in primary care involve low-technology and organizational innovations such as neighborhood-based family medicine."
"Vaccination is a major focus of the Cuban health system, whose childhood immunization program has led to the eradication of measles, mumps and polio, as well as a 30-fold decrease in the incidence of meningitis."
"There are projects to develop vaccines against salmonella and dengue hemorrhagic fever -- a particularly difficult project, as vaccines must be effective against all four dengue viruses to prevent disease."
"Cuba's biotechnology industry is one of the most advanced in emerging countries. Fidel Castro has vowed that Cuba will become the only developing nation to be a significant player in the world's biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industries, and a concerted national effort instigated by Castro himself has made independent progress unmatched elsewhere in the developing world."
"Cuban biotech research has added several vaccines to the national immunization program, and is responsible for drugs such as recombinant streptokinase, the "cloudburst" for heart attack victims produced at a fraction of the cost of imports."
"Cuba has produced a number of valuable medicinal goods, such as epiderman growth factor and policosanol (PPG), an oral medication derived from sugar cane that lowers cholesterol and atherogenic lipoproteins."
"Cuba would be capable of producing biological warfare agents, and Cuba's biotechnology industry could produce many types of toxins. Defector reports claim that the civilian-run Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana is a "front" for a military research center that manufactures anthrax and bubonic plague."
"In February 1997 Cuban President Fidel Castro compared the United States to a dragon and Cuba to a lamb and warned that if the dragon tried to eat the lamb, it would find its meal "poisoned" -- setting off speculation concerning Cuba's biological warfare capabilities."
In Cuba, of course, the social solidarity and the emancipation from the 'false conscience' of capitalism makes it all worthwhile.
I predict an uprising in Cuba at Fidel's death. I understand he still refuses to name an heir apparent. Who will get the prize as the last Marxist head of state in Latin America? Castro? Chavez? de Silva? I only know they will all be gone in a few years.
ping
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