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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Cuba's Healthcare Horror

Cuba's Healthcare Horror
Posted by Humberto Fontova on Mar 10th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage.

"My nation is hardly perfect in human rights. A very large number of our
citizens are incarcerated in prison, and there is little doubt that the
death penalty is imposed most harshly on those who are poor, black, or
mentally ill. For more than a quarter century, we have struggled
unsuccessfully to guarantee the basic right of universal health care for
our people. …but Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal
education."

Thus did Jimmy Carter, in a May 2002 speech at the University of Havana
that was broadcast throughout Cuba, prostrate himself before a regime
that has jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than
Stalin and murdered (in absolute numbers) more political prisoners in
its first three years in power (out of a population of 6.4 million) than
Hitler murdered in its first six years (out of a population of 70
million.) Not to mention that President Carter's host, Fidel Castro,
insulted his nation as "a vulture preying on humanity" and came within a
hair of nuking it.

Carter is not the only one to trumpet the supposed glories of Cuban
health care. Let's consider the following quotes:

"Health care (in Cuba) was once for the privileged few. Today it is
available to every Cuban and it is free….Health and education are the
revolution's great success stories." — Peter Jennings, World News
Tonight, April 3, 1989

"Castro has brought great health care to his country" — ABC's Barbara
Walters, Oct. 11, 2002

"Even today, Cuba has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the
world." — Katie Couric reporting on NBC's Today, February 13, 1992

"Frankly, to be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better
than being a poor child in Miami, and I'm not going to condemn their
lifestyle so gratuitously."– Newsweek's Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin
Group, April 8, 2000

Contrary to the above "news analysts" and Human Rights spokespersons,
Cubans have a drastically different story to tell. And even more
unluckily for Castro and his MSM auxiliaries, the internet has pulled a
stunning and (to them) infuriating end run around his traditional MSM
defenses. Word is getting out about the disastrous state of Cuban health
care.

During that cold snap in mid-January, Cuban dissidents snuck out, via
internet, a report claiming that over forty patients had somehow frozen
to death in Cuba's Mazorra mental hospital — not far from the one
featured in Michael Moore's paean to Cuban health care, Sicko. Cuba's
Stalinist regime, along with the media courtesans to whom it grants
press bureaus and "journalist visas," were utterly mum on the matter,
however. It took three days — as the word spread through the mostly
Spanish-language web –but finally the Stalinist regime issued a terse
and exculpatory press-release on the matter.

But the story did not go away. Just last week, pictures of some of the
dead were snuck out of Cuba. They proved that hypothermia alone was not
the cause of death, any more than it was the cause of the death for the
prisoners at Dachau or Buchenwald. Horrific malnutrition and savage
beatings were plain to see for anyone genuinely interested in the causes.

Needless to add, such interested parties do not include Castro's favored
members of the press. True to form, they dutifully connived with the
regime, as they have for half a century, to hide the catalog of
Castroite horrors.

But don't take my word for it. Apparently tormented by their
consciences, two Spanish journalists have just released mea-culpa- books
(sadly available only in Spanish) about this collusion. "Self-censorship
is a very common practice," one writes. "No journalist on the island can
write the truth of what happens there." Whatever their faults, at least
these Spanish journalists finally came clean. When will Barbara Walters,
Dan Rather, Andrea Mitchell, Ted Turner, Herbert Matthews and the rest
of the bunch come clean? Don't hold your breath.

The Cuban health stories ignored or buried by the MSM would require an
entire 24-hour network broadcasting for five decades to disclose. Senor
Marzo Fernandez, an economist who, until defecting in 1996, served as
Secretary General of Castro's Ministry of Nutrition gets us started.
"The average height of Cubans has decreased by 8 centimeters in the past
25 years," he reported on Miami television. "For the first time in Cuban
history, thousands of Macrocepahlic children (abnormally large heads in
proportion to their bodies) due to protein (primarily milk) deficiencies
have been found in the eastern provinces." This in a country that prior
to the glorious revolution enjoyed a lower infant-mortality rate and
more doctors and dentists per-capita than half of European countries,
plus a larger middle class than Switzerland.

Not everyone welcomes the exposure of Cuba's human rights record. Not so
long ago, Alan Colmes on Fox berated me saying: "Oh! Ok, so now 40 years
after his death all of a sudden YOU discover all this horrible stuff
about Cuba Che Guevara!"

"No, no, no," I patiently explained to Mr. Colmes, "many have been
documenting and broadcasting accounts of Castro and Che Guevara's
butcheries, imbecilities and cowardice for decades–but the mainstream
media was too busy eating out of Castro's hand to pay attention. So
these horrors could never make it past the mainstream media filter. Well
Alan, I hate to break the news to you, but your side's media monopoly is
over."

Cuba's Healthcare Horror | FrontPage Magazine (10 March 2010)
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/10/cuba%E2%80%99s-healthcare-horror/

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