TheCardinal, a frequent Babalu commenter, dropped me a note about this article by Tom Gjelten in World Affairs Journal. He gives a pretty well-rounded view of the Cuba situation for those many who are unfamiliar.

A short excerpt:

The politicization of public life is even seen in health care and education. The government has devoted substantial resources to vaccination campaigns, nutrition education, and community clinics, but the services are delivered in such a way as to reinforce the authority of the Party and the state. Health workers serve the Cuban revolution, not the Cuban patient. There is no such thing as doctor-patient confidentiality and no concept of individual patient rights. The schooling story is similar. School administrators are held to high standards, and Cuban children score highly on standardized achievement tests. But Cuban schools are centralized, with a hierarchical chain of command and no parental role in governance or policy decisions. Rote learning is the rule, and students are taught to be subservient to the Communist Party and the Cuban state. A chill went up my spine the first time I visited a Cuban classroom and heard the students line up in formation and shout, “¡Seremos como el Che!” We will be like Che!

American visitors to the island often bring along ideological baggage from their own experiences back home. I know I have. My one visit to Cuba prior to my 1994 reporting trip was in 1980, when I went there as a young teacher. I was curious about Cuba’s implementation of its “Schools in the Countryside” program, which had struck me—on the basis of what I had read—as an interesting secondary education model. Each of the schools was attached to a farm, and the students alternated classroom learning with productive work in some aspect of the agricultural enterprise. In theory, the students took responsibility for generating the revenue needed to support the school and in the process learned valuable lessons about enterprise management. The school I visited in Cuba seemed to be working well, and I came away impressed.

It was only years later, back in Cuba as a journalist, that I learned that the escuelas en el campo were deeply unpopular. Students from urban backgrounds were sent to the countryside schools involuntarily, and many parents saw them as institutions of political indoctrination, designed at least in part to substitute the Cuban state for the Cuban family in the formation of adolescent thinking and values. Moreover, discipline was loose in the farm schools, and the pregnancy rate among the girls was very high, as was the number of abortions performed in health clinics serving the student population. Such thoughts had not occurred to me as an idealistic young American being guided around the one school I visited.

There's a quote in there from Val too. As true today as it was back when he wrote it:

Val Prieto, whose Babalu Blog is widely followed in exile circles, opposed the relaxation of remittance restrictions in a December 2006 posting, arguing instead to keep the pressure on the regime, even if it meant more short-term suffering for ordinary Cubans. “Let Fidel take care of the Cuban people,” he wrote. “And if the Cuban people remain content with that, if they are content being slaves, being second class citizens in their own country, being beggars of tourists and foreigners, living in squalor, with no hope and no future, scrounging for food and selling their asses and souls for scraps, then there is nothing else to say.”