From our Bureau of Willful Blindness
An essay in Diario de Cuba asks: “How many people have died in Cuba, their illnesses worsen, or suffer intense pain, due to the lack of essential medicines? Why this health disaster? What is the government doing to fix it?”
Great questions. Good luck finding answers. Good luck finding news coverage of the lack of medicines and medical care in Cuba.
As Cubans struggle with the collapse of their failed government and a dysfunctional healthcare system, dozens of websites can still be found that praise Castro, Inc.’s medical prowess and suggest that the whole world should follow Cuba’s lead.
Even The National Institutes of Health, an entity of the US Government, affirms that “in Cuba, universal health access and coverage rest on three key principles: health as a human right, equity and solidarity (…) with coverage and access without exclusions”.
Abridged and loosely translated from Diario de Cuba
In a survey carried out on the island by Cubadata and quoted a few days ago by DIARIO DE CUBA, 55.8% of those interviewed describe access to medicines as “impossible”, and 80.3% say that they find them with “a lot of difficulty”. That’s the case in the “medical powerhouse” praised by the left, particularly the United States.
Right now you can read online an article in The New York Times entitled “What we can learn from Cuba’s health system,” signed by Nicholas Kristof, who among other things states that medical care in Cuba “is capable of ensuring that no one is left neglected (…) all for free (…) an American baby is almost 50% more likely to die than a Cuban one (…) Cuba has developed its own pharmaceutical industry, in part to circumvent the US embargo.”. . .
. . . Many more pages could be filled with the propaganda that continues to be read worldwide about a health system that, in fact, has collapsed because it was left without a foreign patron to subsidize it.
Officially, 251 essential medicines are missing, but they are more
But let’s skip the disastrous medical care as such and examine the lack of medication, possibly the worst scourge of all. It is not known how many Cubans have died, will die, or will worsen their ills due to not receiving the necessary medicine, due to the absence of medical instruments to assist them, or to carry out urgent surgical interventions and hospital treatments.
However, with the little that the regime admits, one has an idea. The BioCubaFarma monopoly, producer and distributor of medicines in the country, recently recognized that 251 of the 369 basic medicines are lacking, 40% of them.
Of course, if the Government says that there are 251, the deficit is greater. In addition, BioCubaFarma gave this news mainly to blame the “blockade” of the United States. And so did the president of that monopoly, Eduardo Martínez, who “forgot” to say that the world’s largest suppliers of products used to manufacture medicines are China and India, magnificent friends of Castroism. The US buys 80% of the raw material to produce drugs from them.
Whole story HERE in Spanish
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What is Cuba’s government going to do about this? Keep producing doctors for export. Why? Because that brings in real money, and meeting the health needs of Cubans costs money. Dead simple.
As for the outside world, it effectively thinks that Cubans have it as good as they deserve, what with being lowly savages and all. There may be some ignorance in that, but it’s mostly hijeputez.
But not to worry. The ruling class is not affected by this situation, so it’s no skin off their noses.
And any supposedly serious and professional news source that publishes the kind of flagrant misinformation found in that quoted NYT piece is simply an accomplice and enabler of evil, period.