Residents don't have any freedoms

Originally created Friday, March 2, 2007
CUBA: Residents don't have any freedoms

African slaves in 19th-century America were gainfully employed, offered
free housing, free food and even medical care on the plantations of many
benevolent owners.

Of course, if I were writing an opinion column, this would require me to
overlook facts inconvenient to the point I was trying to make - that the
slaves were deprived of their liberty and human dignity. No benevolence
could possibly justify that basic evil.

In a recent column, as Tonyaa Weathersbee extols the Cuban health care
system and its kind dictator, Fidel Castro, who offers free medical
school to less fortunate Americans, she overlooks the same evil.

Cuba is a slave state. No Cuban living on the island enjoys even the
minimal, basic freedoms (where to work, where to travel, how to worship
and what to say in public) that we take for granted every day.

Yet, she continues to praise Cuba for its willingness to export its
free, universal health care by sending doctors to help Hurricane Katrina
victims and by educating aspiring doctors who couldn't get in U.S.
medical schools.

Then, she criticizes the U.S. government for saying no to the offer.

In Weathersbee's mind, Castro is a kind, benevolent plantation master.

She chooses to ignore that every Cuban on the island is a slave,
deprived of basic freedom and human dignity.

And what of Cuba's vaunted health care system? The one Weathersbee wants
exported to our shores?

Does she not know when Castro became ill that he did not trust his care
to the Cuban health care system he brags so much about?

It is a dirty little secret that, since becoming seriously ill himself,
Castro has been treated by physcian Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, the chief
of gastrointestinal care at Gregorio Maranon Hospital in Madrid, Spain.

Garcia had to bring in current Spanish medical equipment and technology
to treat Castro.

If Cuban health care is so good, why did a doctor, and lots of medical
equipment, have to be imported from Spain to treat Castro?

Who is exporting medical care to whom?

And if Cuban health care is good enough for Katrina victims, why isn't
it good enough for Castro?

Weathersbee and I can certainly agree that it would be nice for
lower-income students in the United States to have more access to
medical school and more access to medical care in poorer areas of the
United States.

However, people in the United States don't need Cuban doctors or Cuban
medical schools until Cuba is a free society.

Let's find other - morally responsible - ways to fix our own issues.

The end doesn't justify the means.

JORGE MIYARES, Jacksonville

http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/030207/opl_8317145.shtml