A chilling report, forwarded to the world via clandestine email by Cuban dissident Martha Beatriz Roque.
This is what can happen when the government runs everything, including the distribution of food and health care, and you’ve had the nerve to criticize the way things are run. Behold the Cuban health care system, which can easily be turned into a tool of repression.
Cuba’s Kafkaesque health care: the envy of the world!
Crístofer, 6, Condemned to Hunger
by Tania de la Torre Montesinos.Alexis Torres Pérez, who resides at calle Aguilera, No. 10 A in the town of Niquero in Granma Proviince, wants the world to know that his six-year-old son, Crístofer Torres Viltre has been diagnosed with chronic ideopathic colitis, and that Dr. Yolili Mompié Santos, a specialist at the municipal clinic, has prescribed two special diets as absolutely necessary due to the boy’s condition: Number 3024, consisting of yoghurt, red meat, and milk, and Number. 42009, consisting of chicken and red meat.
When the boy’s father went to the Office of Alimentary Control (Oficoda: Oficina de Control de Alimentos), the director, Idalmis Palma, whose phone number is 23592613, informed him that she could not approve these diets because the national law stipullates that individuals can only be allowed one special diet.
When the father went to the local office of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC: Partido Comunista de Cuba), he was met by the receptionist, Catalina Vargas, and when he requested an appointment with the party’s First Secretary, this receptionist told him that “counter-revolutionaries deserve to be burned” (“que a los contrarrevolucionarios hay que darles candela”), and he responded by saying that those who deserve to be burned are the officials who run Niquero, who are all corrupt thieves.
The boy’s father has not been able to speak with the First Secretary, Miguel Álvarez Anaya, because this official hides and refuses to meet with him. In the meantime, the father asks himself “What will happen to my sick son, who is unable to obtain the diet prescribed for him by a qualified specialist?”
Granma, 26 de diciembre de 2012.
Is middle person in the top photo a transgender, or just a pre-op drag queen? Well, it IS Cuba, after all.
That picture of Che makes Mike Tyson look like a refined intellectual. Of course, Che was a loutish, arrogant faux intellectual, so it’s all good.
Ms. Vargas will turn out to have been under severe duress to sound like a bitch, or to have been duped and confused, or to have been traumatized and embittered by failing to make it as a jinetera. In any event, she will NOT be responsible for her behavior. Nobody will be, with few exceptions. Everybody will turn out to have been a hapless victim of bad circumstances, or something. Wait for it.
Mr. Pérez needs to do what all Cubans do: look for a US solution. Just call up the National Council of Churches, or maybe just the Methodists, and they’ll fix this right up. They cared SO much for little Elian that surely they’ll care no less about his son. If nothing else, they’re sure to issue a public condemnation of the US embargo as being responsible for his son’s predicament.
Caption for top pic: If their healthcare sucks, let them try ideological therapy.