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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katelew who wrote (50285)	2/26/2008 3:18:17 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541518

Castro’s Cuba was no place for a socialist like me spectator.co.uk Cuba: A few Impressions mahalanobis.twoday.net therealcuba.com CUBA'S REPRESSIVE MACHINERY Human Rights Forty Years After the Revolution hrw.org 21 March 2007 Cuban Repression of Journalists Deemed To Have Worsened World community marks anniversary of "Black Spring" in Cuba america.gov Castro's Dictatorship and Cuban Health Care: Cuban communism may be repressive, but at least it provides good helath care. This is a common trope of left-wing apologias for Castro's brutal dictatorship. This claim is getting recycled yet again in the wake of Castro's recent resignation (e.g. here). One response to this point is that of liberal Berkeley economist Brad DeLong: Cuba would likely have a much higher standard of living (and better health care) today had it not gone communist in 1959. As DeLong documents, Cuba in the 1950s was one of the richest countries in Latin America and rapidly approaching Western European standards of living and health outcomes. Under communism, it became one of the poorest nations in the Western hemisphere - despite receiving vast quantities of heavily subsidized oil from the Soviet Union for decades. Taking Cuban official statistics at face value (as DeLong does), Cuban health outcomes and standards of living are roughly similar to those of Mexico and the Dominican Republic. In the 1950s, DeLong notes, Cuba was vastly better off than these countries and, on some measures (such as infant mortality) better than many Western European nations. But there is an even more basic problem with the "at least Castro improved health care" excuse: it assumes that official Cuban government health care statistics are accurate. I find that assumption highly improbable. A government that brutally represses dissent and executed over 100,000 political prisoners out of a population of just 6.3 million is unlikely to be above falsifying its official statistics in order to improve its image. That was certainly common practice in other communist societies, including those which Castro used as models for his own. When the Iron Curtain fell in Eastern Europe, scholars rapidly determined that official Soviet and East European statistics were routinely falsified to burnish the communist regimes' public image. As this foolishly credulous 1973 Time article noted, official East German stats indicated that, by 1970, East Germany had a higher standard of living than Italy and was rapidly closing in on Britain. Anybody with even the slightest familiarity with actual East German living standards knows how far such communist claims were from reality. How bad is Cuban health care really? I don't know. Probably no one will know until the regime finally falls and honest data can be collected. For now, it's at least worth noting that the government health care clinics available to ordinary Cubans (those not members of the government elite) look like this and this. It's also worth noting that if Cuban living standards and health care really were as good as the government claims, it's unlikely that millions of Cubans would have risked their lives to flee the country - not only for the wealthy United States, but even for such far poorer destinations as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It's especially telling that many Cuban refugees prefer even Haiti (the one Latin American nation that probably really is poorer than Cuba) to life under Castro. The evidence of people risking their lives to vote with their feet is a lot more compelling than the Cuban government's dubious health statistics. UPDATE: I am aware that some of the data on Cuban health care comes from the United Nations and other international organizations. However, the UN and the others depend on information provided by the Cuban government. You can't do independent data collection in a totalitarian dictatorship. Thus, the UN numbers are derivative of Cuban official statistics. volokh.com Cuban health statistics Submitted by Constant on Wed, 2007-09-19 06:51. * Public Every so often, an enemy of liberty will point out that Cuba has fantastic health care, in fact it's overflowing with health care, it has so much great health care that it sends doctors to other countries to give them something to do because everybody is just so darned healthy in Cuba. I don't know if it really amounts to anything but I did run across this paper (pdf) which critically examines the assumption that the Cuban health statistics are reliable. The author points out that ideocratic states often use very authoritarian tactics--tactics that individual doctors and patients can subjectively experience very negatively--to create and maintain favorable health statistics. When issues of state power and social control are factored into the analysis, it becomes possible to see how Cuba’s health indicators are at least in some cases obtained by imposing significant costs on the Cuban population--costs that Cuban citizens are powerless to articulate or protest, and foreign researchers unable to empirically investigate. The author highlights a telling anecdote that illustrates the atmosphere of intimidation and secrecy in Cuba: One family doctor told me that she once led an instructional seminar for medical students at the University of Havana. During the seminar they reviewed several problematic cases, one of which involved a patient who had died due to mistakes made by a doctor. The case was included as a warning to the students to be careful in following established treatment protocols and surgical procedures. After the seminar, one of the medical students approached the doctor and told her that after reading the case file, she realized that the patient in the case study was actually a close relative of hers. She said that the doctors who treated him told her family he had died of natural causes, and she was very traumatized to find he had actually died from malpractice. The doctor running the seminar sympathized with the student’s grief and anger, but told her it would be better if she kept quiet and made no complaint against the hospital. To do so would be to risk being labeled a political dissident or a counterrevolutionary. The student reluctantly concurred. distributedrepublic.net Cuba Peter Tatchell writes on the treatment of homosexuals under Castro: While Castro challenged many backward ideas as remnants of the old society, he embraced with enthusiasm the homophobia of Latin machismo and Catholic dogma, elevating it into a fundamental tenet of Cuba’s new socialist morality. Idealising rural life, he once claimed approvingly that “in the country, there are no homosexuals". When Cuba adopted Soviet-style communism it also adopted Soviet-style prejudice and puritanism. Ever since Stalin promoted the ideology of “the socialist family” and recriminalised gay sex in 1934, communist orthodoxy dictated that homosexuality was a “bourgeois decadence” and “capitalist degeneration”. This became the Cuban view. “Maricones” (faggots) were routinely denounced as “sexual deviants” and “agents of imperialism”. Laughable allegations of homosexuality were used in an attempt to discredit “corrupting” Western influences, such as pop music, with the communists circulating the rumour that the Beatles were gay. galha.org The punishment for homosexuality during 1960s and 1970s in Cuba was "rehabilitation" in a labor camp. The camps subjected prisoners to hard labor, meager food rations, and violent gangs that physically and sexually attacked other prisoners. The Cuban labor camp system was inspired by that of Stalinist Russia and set about to mold individuals into what their rulers thought they should be. distributedrepublic.net