The inherent corruption in Cuba’s much-vaunted socialist healthcare system has led to critical shortages in medicine, which in turn has led to unnecessary deaths and suffering. Besides selling medical professionals as slave labor to foreign countries, the Cuban dictatorship has done little to address the issue, and we may never know how many Cubans have died or are suffering due to their malfeasance.
Roberto Alvarez Quiñones explains in Diario de Cuba:
How many people are dying in Cuba due to the lack of medicine?
How many people have died in Cuba, have seen their diseases aggravated, or suffered intense pain, due to the lack of essential medicines? What is behind the health disaster? What is the government doing to deal with it?
These are three questions that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom should ask Miguel Díaz-Canel and José Ángel Portal, Cuba’s Public Health Minister.
In a survey conducted on the island by Cubadata and cited a few days ago by DIARIO DE CUBA, 55.8% of those interviewed describe access to medicines as “impossible”, and 80.3% describe it as “very difficult.” This is happening in the “medical powerhouse” praised by the Left, particularly the United States’.
Right now one can read an online article in The New York Times entitled “What we can learn from the Cuban health system,” signed by Nicholas Kristof, who, among other things states that medical care in Cuba “is able to ensure that no one is left unattended (…) everything is 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.”
On another U.S. website, MEDICC, Dr. William Keck claims that “many high-income countries could learn a lot from Cuba’s model (…) the country’s health system is universally accessible and fully integrated.”
The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, an entity of the US Government itself, states that “in Cuba, universal health access and coverage hinge on three key principles: health as a human right, equity and solidarity (…) with coverage and access without exclusions.”
In addition, the journal Science has published the conclusion of a study by scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. Quoted by BBC News in London, it contends that “(US) sanctions have not prevented Cubans from enjoying better health standards than many countries in Latin America, with levels that can be compared to those in developed countries (…) their health-related success is due to excellent prevention and health promotion programs.”
Many more pages could be filled with the propaganda that continues to be read worldwide about a health system that, in fact, has imploded because it was left without a foreign benefactor to bankroll it.
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