BAD JOKE: HEALTH CARE IN CUBA

Bad Joke: Health care in Cuba

Myriam Marquez
Commentary

Published in The Orlando Sentinel on September 29, 2000

Fidel Castro recently offered to send Cuban doctors to poor neighborhoods in the United States. Funny guy.

Anyone who has followed the Cuban dictator's obsession with Uncle Sam knows that the offer was Castro's little joke, meant as a big insult.

Communist propaganda aside, the stark reality of Cuba's primitive health-care system should give us pause.

Health care for the poor in the United States isn't all it could be for such a rich nation, but Cuba's medical care is outright dangerous.

That isn't a conclusion culled from right-wing Cuban-American propaganda. It's the sad reality, witnessed by Cuban defector after defector.

Two recent defectors, Dr. Leonel Cordova Rodriguez, a general practitioner, and Dr. Noris Pena Martinez, a dentist, spent more than a month in a Zimbabwe prison until international pressure forced that African nation to release them. The doctors, both in their 30s, were part of a 107-member Cuban medical mission to Zimbabwe. They say they decided to defect because they couldn't take the revolution's lies any more.

In testimony on Capitol Hill last week, Cordova called Cuba's health-care system a "disgraceful situation" and put the responsibility squarely on "the totalitarian regime imposed by communism in Cuba."

Ending the U.S. embargo against Cuba, both doctors said, wouldn't improve the lot of the average Cuban either.

"With or without the U.S. embargo, the Cuban people will suffer," Pena said glumly.

Such pessimism comes from living through decades of broken promises. Today, Cuba has its own system of apartheid.

"Foreign tourists and Cuban revolutionary leaders enjoy the best medical attention, in luxurious and well-equipped hospitals, without feeling the lack of resources and what the human cost is to the Cuban population, who, in turn, are subjected to the worst restrictions," Cordova said. "While in the dollar shops you can find the existence of many resources, these are not at the reach of the average Cuban. Made in Cuba but property only of the Cuban government."

Cordova's reference to "made in Cuba" speaks to the double standard. Cuba's government-run pharmaceutical industry rations medicines to its own people even as it sells the drugs to other countries. Cordova counted on Catholic charities to help provide drugs, but those resources are limited because the Cuban government sets up obstacles.

The double standard applies to the island's medical schools, too. Cordova said Cuban medical students are trained "in adverse situations, without advanced medical texts and with obsolete eqiupment and inhumane living conditions."

Cordova contrasted that with the "thousands of foreigners [who] are studying at the Ibero- american Medical School in Havana, enjoying a free gift, the ideal conditions to develop and achieve quality education. The vast majority of them [are] millionaires in their countries of origin, as we saw in Zimbabwe."

Cuban doctors are forced to delay care, risking death to patients, all in an effort to give Cubans time to find a relative with U.S. dollars to buy the care that Castro's revolution promised for free.

"There's a consensus that Fidel is not what the country needs or wants and that we've been manipulated," Cordova said. "That's one of the reasons we need to let people know what's happening in Cuba."

Cuba's much-vaunted health-care system, the pride of Castro's Marxist revolution, is a sham, and ending the embargo won't change any of it. So say the children of his revolution, even as the world once again turns a deaf ear.

END

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