From: rravelo@orion.oac.uci.edu (Ray Ravelo)
Subject: Re: Human Rights in Cuba
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 23 Dec 92 21:55:33 GMT

In article <1992Dec23.185719.20465@zeus.ieee.org> jbarth@ep.ieee.org writes:
>Ray, 
>

>
>	"There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
>
>The only answer I can give is that serious scholars in the medical, public
>health, and nursing fields from throughout the world, especially other
>Third World countries seeking to modernize their own health care systems,
>have been closely studying the Cuban health system for many years.  There
>are countless articles in the specialty journals and many monographs have
>been written on the subject.  
>
>The Cuban health model has not been accepted unquestioningly -- its "Community 
>Doctor" initiative, for example, has been criticized for spending scarce health 
>funds on physicians instead of training community health workers.  And the
>practice of quarantining AIDS patients has raised serious human rights
>questions.
>
>But on the whole, the public health initiatives that Cuba has undertaken,
>especially in the field of pre-natal care, infant and child health, and
>immunization, are undoubted successes.  No serious scholar in the field
>of international public health questions these successes; that doesn't
>mean that there aren't substantive debates within the field about 
>other facets of the Cuban health system.

 Jeremy, thanks for your answers to my questions. It seems to me that even
 though you like the Cuban model you're not a fanatic.
 I just would like to tell you that before Castro our health care was much
 better than your average Latin A. country. At least two of the public 
 hospitals Castro now is taking credit for were there way before his regime
 and were also free to the poor or even the not so poor. Those two
 hospitals are the Calixto Garcia and the Hospital Infantil in Havana. My
 parents were not wealthy but we could affort to pay our private clinic and
 yet once in a while I was taken to the Hosp. Infantil to see specialists
 that either were not available at my clinic at all or were at that time
 donating their services to that public hospital.
 
 Also I would like to indicate to you and others that the University of
 Havana had (way before Castro) one of the best medical schools in L.A.
 and hundreds if not thousands of foreign (mainly from L.A.) students
 got their madical training there. So the fact that there are excellent
 doctors/surgeons there now is not entirely Castro's "gift" to the world
 like a guy in a previous msg. implied. I know many doctors who chose to
 stay in Cuba rather than leave their country, - for many reasons and not
 necessarily political. Many stayed because they did not like the idea of
 going back to school here in the States to get their credentials valid
 while in the meantime working in menial jobs; still, many of the best doctors
 that came here ended up working for prestigious institutions like the Mayo
 Clinic. For instance, the eye doctor who refined the contact lenses of today
 is from Cuba and I remember that as early as the mid-fifties open heart
 surgery was performed and televised LIVE to the country.
 No, we were far from being the backward and iliterate country Castro and
 his friends are so fond of portraying our country to be before he came to
 "save" us! No, I keep saying that even though we had problems and a criminal
 dictator (Batista) we still were 100% better off than today!


>everything.  (The US economic blockade has been quite "successful," especially
>with the collapse of the Eastern block).


 That's a fallacy, most western european countries as well as many L.A.
 countries continue doing business with Castro to this day and the US is
 not blockading any ships from entering Cuban ports, simply the US does
 not want to help Castro's government, - for many reasons. First Castro
 confiscated billions of dollars worth of US companies in Cuba without one
 cent of compensation. Second, Castro right from the begining of his
 government started creating problems not only in this region, but as far
 as Somalia, Etiopia and Mozambique. Besides, how do you think Castro is
 going to pay for US foodstuff and medicines anyway? Should the US give
 Cuba all that stuff for free so he could use his money to buy more weapons?
 Do you remember the Cuban missile crisis and what Nikita said in his memoirs
 about Castro's madness?


>
>But I differentiate between individuals and the social and political
>system of which they are a part.  Where I differ with people who want
>to overthrow the entire political system is that they choose to 
>ignore major successes, such as health, which were *produced* by that
>system.  The point of my statistical comparison between Cuba and the
>rest of Latin America is that an obvious question is this:

 The social system of which they're a part of is a failure as proven world-wide
 and part of that failure is its intrinsic mechanisms to create monsters
 like Stalin and Castro!


>	Suppose there had been no revolution in 1959.  Would
>	Cuba's health stats be as good as they are today?  
 
 Not only its health stats but all its stats would have been much better than
 today, specially if Castro would had not betrayed the revolution so many
 of our countrymen DIED for!!

>If you were a social scientist, your control might be, say,
>Brazil.  Now, in 1992, you do your comparison and what do you find?
>You find that Brazil is far behind Cuba in basic health indicators.
>So Cuba, whatever its faults (and there are many), has done
>*something* right over the past 30 years that other countries
>have not.  The system is neither all "good" nor all "bad."
 
 I'm no social scientist, but it seems to me that you can not compare a
 country like Brazil with it tremendous size in population and territory
 to a tiny country like Cuba specially with the much better headstart Cuba
 had (as opposed to Brazil) when Castro took over the country. In other words,
 Cuba was a lot more developed and most of its infrastructures were in place
 when Castro came to power. Also the tremendous population explosion Brazil
 is experiencing (unlike Cuba) is too difficult on its economy & social system.

 The way we look at it is that with such a rich and well developed country
 as Cuba was before Castro, by now it could have been a true paradise, not
 the basket case and nightmare it really is.

>I suppose to some this will seem an extreme position.

 Yes, frankly it's bizarre to say the least. That somebody obviously as
 intelligent as you're could buy/believe in that system nowdays is beyond
 my comprehension. Sorry, maybe I'm as stupid as Gilberto(?) keeps telling
 me I am! :-)

>
>Jeremy

 Saludos,
--
Ray I. Ravelo                "We're your opposition, Mr. Castro, we 10 million
Office of Academic Computing. Cubans who look around us in terror"
UC, Irvine.                 from the open letter to Castro by M.E. Cruz-Varela