"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Showing posts with label Cuban healthcare myths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuban healthcare myths. Show all posts
"Continuing with Chavez. What would he say of Cuban health care if he were a widower of one of the women who died in the Palma Soriano maternity hospital?"
Jose Daniel then concludes with a tweet that placed the above questions into the proper context: "The Cuban health system, like so many other things, works very well, yes, for foreigners and the nomenklatura."
Breakfast 7:00am: 1 C. coffee with milk, 1 tsp sugar, 1 fruit, 1 bread, 1 tsp. butter or mayonnaise. Lunch 1:00pm: 3 large spoons rice; 1/2 C. vegetables; 1/2 C. squash, beets, or carrots; meat, chicken, fish, egg or liver; salad, eat freely; 4 tsps. jam. Dinner 7:00pm ( same as lunch). Snacks 10:00am; 4:00pm; 10:30pm: 1 C milk or yogurt, 1 tsp sugar, fruit.
E. is 38 and pregnant. She feels like one more number in the statistics. The other day she called me when she was leaving the polyclinic to say she was coming over. They couldn’t do any more. Half the tests couldn’t be done because they didn’t have the reagents, even though they sent the prescription paper back smeared with someone else’s blood. She’d been up since five in the morning and at ten still hadn’t had breakfast, and to top it off the doctor asked her, “Honey, why did you wait so long to give birth? Now I have to do an electrocardiogram.”
The first thing she said when she saw me was, “I thought the state of education was bad, but now that I’ve come up against the public health system...” E. is like me, very small, but much skinnier. Before her pregnancy she weighed 89 pounds and now, at two months, she weighs 113 and her hemoglobin count is 12.5. Still, the nutritionist thinks she is underweight and has recommended “moving into a maternal home.” She gave her a copy of a diet to follow to the letter. When she showed it to me I started to laugh, but to her there was nothing funny about it.
She has to get up at seven in the morning to have breakfast and this first meal of the day includes a tablespoon of mayonnaise, whose nutritive properties are unknown to me. Throughout the day she must must meet the standard of six large spoons of rice and two ladles of beans (half at lunch and half at dinner, every day until the baby comes). Meat is not defined by quantity and she must eat a half cup of guava jam every day.
I wonder if the diet is to nurture her or to fatten her up. Probably the doctor isn’t authorized to recommend eating certain products like meat or much fish, but at least they should have the decency not to put pregnant women on diets designed to fatten turkeys to make foie gras. In response to the psychologist’s long awaited, “How do you feel?” E. answered, “Fine, but I’d feel better if I didn’t have to come to this polyclinic any more.” http://octavocercoen.blogspot.com/2011/05/breakfast-1-c.html
North Korea's crumbling health system in dire need of aid
15 July 2010
Amputation and other major surgeries carried out without anaesthesia are just one indication of the dire state of North Korea’s healthcare system, a new Amnesty International report has found. The Crumbling state of health care in North Korea draws on interviews with North Koreans and health workers to paint a picture of barely-functioning hospitals void of medicines and epidemics brought on by malnutrition.
Witnesses described hospitals where hypodermic needles were not sterilized and sheets were not regularly washed.
“North Korea has failed to provide for the most basic health and survival needs of its people. This is especially true of those who are too poor to pay for medical care,” said Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Asia-Pacific.
According to the World Health Organization’s last available figures, North Korea spent less on healthcare than any other country in the world – under US$1 per person per year in total.
The North Korean government still claims that its healthcare system is free for all, but many witnesses told Amnesty International that they have had to pay for all services since the 1990s, with doctors usually paid in cigarettes, alcohol or food for the most basic consults, and taking cash for tests or surgery.
The report found that many North Koreans bypass doctors altogether, going straight to the markets to buy medicine, self-medicating according to their own guesswork or the advice of market vendors. The North Korean authorities recently banned a highly addictive narcotic painkiller than many North Koreans routinely used as a cure-all.
“The government’s failure to provide basic education about using medication is especially worrying as North Korea fights a tuberculosis (TB) epidemic,” said Catherine Baber. “A growing number of patients have developed a resistance to first-line anti-TB drugs.”
“The North Korean people are in critical need of medical and food aid,” said Catherine Baber. “It is crucial that aid to North Korea is not used as a political football by donor countries.”
Amnesty International is urging donor countries to continue providing humanitarian aid to North Korea through the UN, and to base it on need and not political considerations.
North Korea needs far more international assistance to improve its public health infrastructure. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) in North Korea is also grossly underfunded, needing more donor support and political backing.
Food shortages remain constant in North Korea. After a botched currency revaluation in December 2009, the price of rice more than doubled and according to an NGO quoted in the report, thousands of people starved to death between January and February of this year in one province alone.
Many of the interviewees reported chronic health problems brought on by a lack of food, and had coped with hunger by eating grass, tree bark and roots. Tuberculosis has made a comeback in North Korea, aggravated by malnutrition.
The report is based on interviews with more than 40 North Koreans now living abroad, most of whom left the North between 2004 and 2009, and with health professionals who work with North Koreans.
“International law, including covenants ratified by North Korea, demands that the government provide adequate levels of food and health care to its population, and to seek international cooperation and assistance when it cannot,” said Catherine Baber.
North Korea was hit by famine in the early 1990s, resulting in the deaths of about a million people, followed by food shortages, which are still ongoing. Government policies significantly exacerbated the crisis.
In 1995 the government finally made an appeal to the international community for food aid and assistance.
But even after the UN and humanitarian aid agencies began distributing food and other essentials in the country, the government impeded their work on the ground, preventing them from accessing large segments of the population.
With the collapse of the government-run food rations and mass job losses due to closures of factories and other state-run enterprises in the 1990s, many North Koreans suffered immense hardship and struggled to survive.
Between 1995 and 2005, the WFP’s emergency operations in North Korea supported up to one-third of the population. Adhering to its “no access, no food” policy, the WFP improved its monitoring of food distribution in North Korea due to greater access within the country.
In September 2005, North Korean authorities announced that it had enough food and ordered the WFP to end its humanitarian aid programme citing better harvests. The North Korean government stated that only medium- and long-term (technical) development assistance would be permitted. However, international food aid through the WFP, which ended in December 2005, resumed a year later after devastating floods in 2006 and 2007.
"We are very pleased that Darsi Ferrer was released the same day of his trial and is back with his family, but he was detained on trumped up criminal charges and in truth he should never have been detained in the first place" said Kerrie Howard, Amnesty International's Americas deputy director.
“Though he has been released, Darsi Ferrer’s sentence still constitutes punishment for criticising the government system and is a powerful message to any Cuban participating in dissenting activities and wishing to express opinions contrary to the government system”. UPDATE June 23, 2010: Reporters Without Borders statement released which in part states:
“We are obviously relieved by Ferrer’s release even if he was finally given a jail sentence to match the time he already had spent behind bars,” Reporters Without Borders said. “No one is fooled about the real reason for his detention as this is a country in which the authorities tolerate no public expression of dissenting views. His release was not in any way an act of clemency or, even less so, a sign of an improvement in respect for basis rights and freedoms.”
Cuba still has approximately 200 prisoners of conscience, who include 24 journalists. One of them is the Reporters Without Borders correspondent Ricardo González Alfonso, who has been held since the “Black Spring” crackdown of March 2003.
Generation Y posts video interview with Dr. Darsi Ferrer by independent journalist Jose Alberto Alvarez shortly after his release:
UPDATE 6:00pm(AP Photo/Franklin Reyes) Darsy Ferrer, a prominent Cuban opposition figure jailed nearly a year ago, kisses his wife Yusnaimy Jorge Soca and son after being released from custody following his trial, in Havana, Tuesday, June 22, 2010.
UPDATE 2:01pm: Reuters and the Associated Press reports that Dr. Darsi Ferrer given conditional release sentenced to 15 months house arrest. First 3 months at home, then 12 months of work. Regime had threatened with 3 years imprisonment. Darsi had already spent 11 months and 1 day in prison without trial. The trial ended about 1:30 p.m. Let us not forget that many remain behind bars. Darsi Ferrer to face trial on Tuesday, June 22, 2010 in Cuba in a process that falls short of international standards. Please call on authorities to release Darsi Ferrer immediately and unconditionally, as he is a prisoner of conscience
UA: 134/10 Index: AMR 25/008/2010 Cuba Date: 18 June 2010
URGENT ACTION
CUBAN Prisoner of conscience FACING TRIAL
Cuban human rights defender Darsi Ferrer is due to be tried on 22 June on spurious charges of receiving illegally obtained goods and violence or intimidation against a state official. He has already been in pre-trial detention for 11 months. Amnesty International believes that he is a prisoner of conscience, and is calling on the authorities to drop the charges against him and release him immediately and unconditionally.
Darsi Ferrer is Director of the Juan Bruno Zayas Health and Human Rights Centre in the Cuban capital, Havana. He has also worked as an independent journalist, and written articles criticizing the Cuban health system. Since July 2009 he has been in pre-trial detention in a maximum security prison intended for inmates convicted of violent crimes.
In July 2009, Darsi Ferrer attempted to organize a march demonstrating against repression in Cuba. A few hours before the march was due to take place on 9 July 2009, Darsi Ferrer and his wife Yusnaimy Jorge Soca were detained by state security officials and police officers. Darsi Ferrer was handcuffed and beaten by more than eight police officers.They were releasedwithout charge a few hours later, but when they arrived home, they noticed that two bags of cement, some iron girders and two window frames, that had been on their property for a few months, were no longer there. According to neighbours, police officers had taken the construction materials. On 21 July, four police officers went to Darsi Ferrer’s home and asked him to accompany them to a police station for questioning about the construction materials. Instead, he was driven to a maximum security prison on the outskirts of Havana and charged with receiving illegally obtained goods and "violence or intimidation against a state official". The latter charge apparently relates to comments Darsi Ferrer was overheard making, saying that an injustice was being committed, that sooner or later things would change in Cuba and this would not happen any more.
Ordinarily, an individual accused of these crimes would be bailed awaiting trial. However, Darsi Ferrer has been refused bail four times. He will be tried before a municipal court, but according to his wife,the presiding judge will be from a provincial court normally dealing with crimes against state security.
Darsi Ferrer has previously been detained and prevented from leading and participating in major human rights events. Since 2006 he has been detained or summoned to a police station around 10 December every year, apparently to prevent him from participating in activities celebrating International Human Rights Day, which falls on that day.
PLEASE WRITE IMMEDIATELY in Spanish or your own language:
Calling on the authorities to release Darsi Ferrer immediately and unconditionally, as he is a prisoner of conscience held simply because of his activism to promote freedom of expression.
Ministerio del Interior, Plaza de la Revolución, La Habana, Cuba
Fax: +53 7 8333085 (via Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
+1 2127791697 (via Cuban Mission to UN)
Salutation:Su Excelencia/Your Excellency
Also send copies to diplomatic representatives of Cuba accredited to your country. Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date.
URGENT ACTION
CUBAN Prisoner of conscience FACING TRIAL
Additional Information
The right to a fair trial is limited in Cuba, with courts and prosecutors under government control. Cuba’s National Assembly elects the President, Vice-President and the other judges of the Peoples’ Supreme Court, as well as the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General. In addition, all courts are subordinate to the National Assembly and the Council of State, raising concerns over internationally recognised standards for fair trial and the right to trial by an independent and impartial tribunal. The right to a fair and proper defence is also unlikely to be fully respected, as lawyers are employed by the Cuban government and as such may be reluctant to challenge prosecutors or evidence presented by the state intelligence services.
Answer: This question cannot be answered as quickly because there are a number of factors involved in the Juan Juan Almeida affair, but for the sake of brevity in this blog entry the focus will be on two of them. MTV's Kurt Loder offers a devastating expose of Micheal Moore's film Sicko where Mr. Loder quotes Cuban doctor Hilda Molina: "Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here." ABC's John Stossel offered a crushing rebuttal of Mr. Moores assertions:
The video Mr. Stossel refers to below with images of the two aspects of Cuba's healthcare system:
Cuba has a two tiered health care system one tier for the nomenklatura (which includes the sons and daughters of revolutionary leaders like Juan Juan Almeida) and foreign tourists with hard currency which is relatively good and offers care with modern equipment and fully stocked pharmacies, and then there is a second tier which is for everyone else which offers broken down equipment, run down buildings and rooms, and scarce supplies not to mention an appalling lack of hygiene and the denial of certain services and lengthy wait times. The statistics and numbers that the international community has access to with relation to the Cuban healthcare system have been manipulated by the dictatorship. Katherine Hirschfeld, an anthropologist, in Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 describes how her idealistic preconceptions were dashed by 'discrepancies between rhetoric and reality,' she observed a repressive, bureaucratized and secretive system, long on 'militarization' and short on patients' rights. This is a scholarly analyis that looks at the Cuban healthcare throughout Cuban history and offers a fair analysis. It is not a political tract. In conclusion, there is a health care system which is rather decent for regime elites and tourists and another one for everyday Cubans that is a disaster. A lot of the footage of the state of real health care in Cuba was provided by Dr. Darsi Ferrer who appears in some of the footage above, and here as well:
Nevertheless, that does not explain the plight of Juan Juan Almeida, the son of a high ranking "hero of the revolution" and a former member of the Ministry of the Interior. Reinaldo Escobar writing from Havana, Cuba offers an answer to this mystery:
Juan Juan Almeida was long favored because he enjoyed, in Cuba, a privilege that in any other place is merely a right: traveling the world. For a long time this problem of the travel permit was, for him, a procedure he paid no attention to, something like having to weigh your luggage at the airport. Any superficial analysis that might be made of his exceptional situation ended up concluding that this, and other benefits he then enjoyed, was due to his being the son of Juan Almeida Bosque, a select member of the highest revolutionary aristocracy, recently deceased.
One day J.J. fell into disgrace and they let him know that now his name was on another list, that of the excluded. Because of this, he is now not allowed to arrange a medical consultation at a hospital in Europe where, as he himself explains, he might have a chance to find a treatment for an illness that has found no solution in his own country. He wrote a book, conducted interviews, wrote letters, and last Friday, November 27, for the second time went out into the street with a poster on which, it is said, he asked for the resignation of the president of the Republic.
There you have the answer Juan Juan Almeida has fallen out of favor with the regime i.e. the Castro brothers and no longer has access to that world of top flight care and freedom of travel that belongs to the regime elite. He is now another Cuban citizen at the mercy of the nomenklatura that runs the island as its personal fiefdom as he once did but no longer can.
José Daniel Ferrer García
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