Cuba, Misunderestimated

by Saul Landau
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Chaired by Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, Bush’s Cuba Commission foresees a “transition to democracy”—not the succession of one Communist dictator to another. Translating this, I read that the United States will guide Cuba’s political reform. Alongside a U.S.-style electoral system and U.S.-style parties, Washington would also privatize Cuba’s economy. For educated Cubans, the vast majority on the island, the report resonates with the language of the 1902 Platt Amendment, which engraved in Cuba’s first Constitution the right for the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs as it saw fit.

The Commission report reads as if Cubans would naively warm to Bush’s plan. The Commission members must think islanders have grown weary of having free rent and would welcome an onrush of Miami-based exiles to privatize their homes and apartments and charge them rent. Instead of getting free education and health care, they would no doubt improve their standards by shelling out to profit-making enterprises to buy these services, as they would for entertainment, utilities and transportation, which the socialist government subsidizes.

Does Bush think Cubans are stupid or crazy? Despite the hardships of daily life, the absence of a free press or political parties, most Cubans understand that Castro built these public services. Moreover, they will tell any visitor that the revolution put Cuba on the historical map. Hundreds of thousands served in military actions that changed the course of southern African history. Until the Cuban revolution, Latin American nations didn’t dare vote contrary to U.S. desires in the Organization of American States or the United Nation.

Under Castro, Cuba opened 13 medical schools that produce more doctors abroad than the World Health Organization. Its athletes, artists and scientists have etched their accomplishments in the minds of people all over the world. When Pakistan was struck by an earthquake, Cuban, not U.S., doctors poured in to help, as they did in Honduras when Nature punished that country.

These facts—not the lack of freedom, which is a serious issue—should serve as context for Fidel Castro’s letter delegating power to his brother Raul.
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[Speaking of Cuban Doctors...]

Medical graduates: 1,593 from 26 countries, BY MARIANELA MARTIN GONZALEZ
• Cuba lending assistance in 68 nations • Island has 71,000 doctors
IF a system for training doctors en masse like the one implemented by the Cubans is not adopted, the future of the peoples is uncertain, because between epidemics and social marginalization the health of the poor of the planet is constantly threatened.

So said Cuban Health Minister José Ramón Balaguer at the central graduation event for students in Medical Science yesterday afternoon at the Victoria de Girón Institute of Basic and Pre-Clinical Science.

As of yesterday, Cuba has 2,314 new health professionals and 1,593 students from 26 countries also received their medical diplomas.

It was in this same venue, inaugurated by Fidel 44 years ago, that the mass training of doctors began after many of those existing on the island emigrated to the United States as a result of campaigns against the Revolution, he recalled.
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