Audit the PAHO: How international health agencies kowtowing to Cuba's dictatorship endangers lives

Bet your life on what the "experts" say?

From CubaBrief

The world is in the midst of a deadly pandemic, in part because international organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), are failing us because they have been co-opted by dictatorships that have priorities in conflict with the mission statements of those entities. It's American subsidiary, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has a record as terrible as WHO. Both organizations have praised the Castro regime, while the WHO has also kowtowed to the Chinese communist dictatorship for years.

PAHO has been caught up in scandals involving the failure to report a viral outbreak of Zika in Cuba in 2017, and human trafficking. The WHO subsidiary was sued, because PAHO was profiting off the trafficking of Cuban doctors in an arrangement with the Castro regime that Mary O' Grady described in her April 12, 2020 OpEd in The Wall Street Journal where she called for an audit of the PAHO. The Yucatan Times also has an important article titled "The Cuban medical brigades -A history of enslavement", raising concerns from a Mexican perspective. 

Along with these scandals is the reality that the quality of the doctors trained in Cuba falls short of the standards in other Latin American countries, raising concerns about the care they provide. But The New York Times reported on something more sinister, how Cuban doctors in Venezuela were ordered to deny or ration care to advance Nicolas Maduro's election prospects in the March 17, 2019 article, "It Is Unspeakable’: How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters," including the denial of needed oxygen to deathly ill patients.

This relationship between PAHO, the World Health Organization, and the Castro dictatorship also resulted in dangerous lies. For example, the 2016 claim of the World Health Organization Bulletin that "last year Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis as public health problems." When I asked visiting Cubans that worked in the healthcare sector about these claims, they just rolled their eyes. Meanwhile, according to Avert, an NGO that provides information on HIV worldwide, “nearly 90 percent of new infections in the Caribbean in 2017 occurred in four countries — Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.”

Health officials in Cuba are most likely under reporting the full impact of the Wuhan Virus in the island now. They have a long track record of not reporting disease outbreaks on the island. Footage has emerged of a dead body in the street in Pinar del Río, and police afraid of being infected trying to figure out what to do.


Victor Batista Falla, uncle of the Grand Duchess Maria Teresa, died of coronavirus in Havana on April 12, 2020. He had been hospitalized at the Pedro Kourí Tropical Medicine Institute for a week. Batista Falla was a prominent publisher and "one of the greatest sponsors of Cuban literature in exile."

CiberCuba reported on April 1, 2020 that the mother of a young girl with coronavirus was detained after criticizing Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz Canel for the spread of the illness. Cynically, Diaz Canel on April 9, 2020 stated that "hiding information can be woefully lethal" but the official communist daily Granma warned that reporting "false or malicious news about the coronavirus" was punishable by up to four years in prison.

Let us examine what the regime considers "false or malicious news" based on how it has applied the policy in the past.

In 1997 when dengue broke out in Cuba, the regime tried to cover it up. When a doctor spoke out, he was locked up, sentenced to 8 years in prison. Amnesty International recognized Dr. Desi Mendoza as a prisoner of conscience, and he was released from prison in 1998 under condition he leave Cuba. The dictatorship eventually recognized that there had been a dengue epidemic.

Calixto Martinez

A 2012 cholera outbreak once again demonstrated how the Cuban public health system operates. News of the outbreak in Manzanillo, in the east of the island, broke in El Nuevo Herald on June 29, 2012 thanks to reporting by the outlawed independent press in the island. Official media did not confirm the outbreak until days later on July 3, 2012. BBC News reported on July 7, 2012 that a patient had been diagnosed with Cholera in Havana. The dictatorship stated that it had it under control. Independent journalist Calixto Martínez was arrested on September 16, 2012 for reporting on the Cholera outbreak, and declared an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. Cholera outbreaks would continue on the island.

The Castro regime succeeded in covering up the 2017 zika outbreak, but eventually in 2019, due to sick foreign tourists diagnosed with the disease, it was traced back to Cuba. PAHO tried to excuse the failure in reporting as a "technical glitch." History of past outbreaks would indicate otherwise.

Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) building in Washington, DC

Worse yet, international media outlets in order to maintain a presence in Cuba have compromised their reporting and too often peddle government propaganda, camouflaged as news and echoing the statements of WHO and PAHO without question, while omitting the history of covering up past epidemics where doctors and journalists were jailed for speaking out.

The Inter American Press Association Report on Cuba in 2011 described the process whereby press agencies can cross the line into biased reporting through something akin to Stockholm syndrome:

The Cuban government wages a policy of the carrot and the stick against foreign correspondents accredited in Havana. If the correspondent becomes too raucous in his criticism, all sorts of problems are created for him until his presence in Havana turns into a torment, or else they denounce him in the official press to the point that he leaves the country. If, on the other hand, if he behaves nicely, they let him work and even facilitate contacts and interviews for him. This brings about permanent self-censorship and even reports with a touch of sympathy for the regime.

Meanwhile independent journalists in Cuba and China, who are trying to do real reporting, are threatened, jailed or go missing. Morning Star News is reporting how a Christian independent journalist has been targeted. "Intelligence officials in Cuba have increased harassment of an independent journalist, summoning [ Yoe Suárez ] and his mother twice in the past two weeks to threaten harsh consequences if he continues reporting on human rights issues, sources said," informed Morning Star News.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has provided a timeline of the explosion of the Wuhan virus around the world and the coverup by Communist China and obsequious statements of the WHO that further legitimized their lies. This kind of timeline should be maintained for the Cuban response to the coronavirus.

Reuters reported the claim made by the official press in Cuba on March 11, 2020 that "four Italian tourists who were staying at a hostel in the southern town of Trinidad after arriving at Havana airport on Monday had presented respiratory symptoms and were taken to a hospital on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the hospital confirmed that three of the tourists had tested positive for the coronavirus, the broadcaster said."

Panama's Ministry of Health, a day earlier, on March 10th reported that two Panamanians, ages 55 and 29 who visited Cuba had tested positive for the coronavirus when they returned home.

On March 11, 2020, Nicolas Maduro was promoting Cuba's "interferon" as a cure that saved "around 3,500 lives in China" declaring Cuba in the vanguard, Caribbean National Weekly called it the antidote for COVID-19, and Newsweek was calling it a "wonder drug." The reality is far more humble. Interferon Alpha-2B Recombinant (IFNrec) was jointly developed with China, but they did not pioneer the discovery of interferon. Interferon research, not surprisingly, was pioneered in Switzerland in the 1950s.

Despite this, the Cuban dictatorship's military run tourism industry continued to pitch Cuba as a travel destination last month and posted a tweet on March 13, 2020 claiming that Coronavirus does not replicate at high temperatures and that the island is now 29-32 degrees Celsius. Havanatour is owned and run by the Cuban military.

On March 16, 2020 Barbara Díaz, director of marketing for the Castro regime's Ministry of Tourism in a press conference said, “Clients who decide of their own free will to come to Cuba are welcomed.” The dictatorship's director of marketing declared that “our social function is to receive tourists, give them assistance ... and demonstrate that Cuba is a safe country in all aspects.” The government had not canceled flights from Italy or other hot spot countries, reported Nora Gamez in The Miami Herald.

The fiction presented by the Cuban government was that the Wuhan virus was not present in Cuba until March 9, 2020 when these four Italian tourists arrived to Cuba, but how does one explain that the Florida Department of Health announced on March 15, 2020 that a 17-year-old male from Cuba tested positive [for the Wuhan virus] in Hillsborough County.

On March 6, 2020 Granma, the official communist newspaper of Cuba, made the claim that "to date, no cases of Coronavirus ( Covid-19 ) have been confirmed in Cuba." At the time, there were cases in Brazil, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Argentina, Paraguay, Spain, the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, France, and many other places. Regime officials claim to be ready if and when an outbreak takes place.

This type of claim was made during the zika outbreak in 2016-2017 and it was learned in 2019, through studies of zika infected tourists from around the world, that Cuba had over 5,000 zika cases active on the island in 2017 that the dictatorship did not report.

At the same time officials of the Castro regime reported that there is a shortage of soap and detergent in Cuba that will not be alleviated until May - June 2020.

The Castro regime blames the embargo for its shortages, although those items are not restricted by US sanctions, but Cubans blame the internal blockade raised by the Castro regime and are circulating a petition calling for its end so that civil society can create a humanitarian bridge and get supplies to Cubans in need.

South Florida has become a hot spot for the pandemic in Florida. Furthermore, the emerging hot spot in Florida is Hialeah, the city with the largest number of Cubans per capita in Florida. Not shutting down travel to and from Cuba earlier, because the regime failed to alert the severity of the outbreak on the island, may be a contributing factor to this emerging disaster.

Hundreds of thousands of people are dying, and the numbers could rise to the millions, but too many are still giving the benefit of the doubt to dictatorships such as Cuba's and China's and the consequences will continue to be dire.

The Cuban dictatorship reported on April 13, 2020 that it had a total of 726 coronavirus cases, 121 recovered and 21 deaths. Meanwhile North Korea, a Cuban ally, continues to report no cases.

Willing to bet your life on the accuracy of these numbers?

Correcting The New York Times spin machine on the 2017 Zika outbreak in Cuba

Setting the paper of record straight

The New York Times spin machine is working over time trying to cover up the fact that healthcare in Cuba is a disaster.  In a August 22, 2019 article by Carl Zimmer, "Zika Was Soaring Across Cuba. Few Outside the Country Knew", the newspaper tries to shift the blame for an unreported outbreak of Zika in Cuba in 2017 on a reporting glitch. This ignores a decades long government pattern of covering up epidemics.

"Until now, the Pan American Health Organization had no record of any Zika infection in Cuba in 2017, much less an outbreak. Following inquiries by The New York Times about the new study, published in the journal Cell, officials acknowledged that they had failed to tally 1,384 cases reported by Cuban officials that year. [...] Officials at P.A.H.O., an arm of the World Health Organization, blamed the failure to publish timely data on the Cuba outbreak on a “technical glitch.” The information was held in a database, they said, but not visible on the website. By Thursday afternoon, the website had been updated."

On August 25, 2016 this blog raised concerns about the reporting on Zika in Cuba. This was done by looking back at past Castro regime responses to previous epidemics, and expressed skepticism of reporting that claimed their was nothing to worry about.

Daniel Chang of the Miami Herald reported on August 17, 2016 in the article "How Cuba is fighting Zika" in the first paragraph a claim that should raise concerns:

"After Cuba was ravaged in 1981 by an epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever — a mosquito-borne illness — the island nation’s communist government launched an aggressive response that created the framework for its reportedly successful fight against Zika, according to an article published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature."

Tragically, the so-called aggressive response to dengue by 1997 involved arresting at least one doctor for enemy propaganda who correctly warned of a Dengue outbreak.  Eventually when the bodies started to pile up, it was no longer possible to cover up the epidemic, and the regime admitted it had a problem. This pattern of denial and lack of transparency was repeated with a cholera outbreak in 2012.

On September 2, 2016 this blog again warned about the dangers of Zika and Associated Press reports that Cuba had "remarkable success in containing Zika virus." This report made no mention of the regime's past history of covering up epidemics on the island.

On January 8, 2019 New Scientist reported: "Cuba failed to report thousands of Zika virus cases in 2017," but this blog added that New Scientist had "forgot to mention that Havana failed to report outbreaks of Dengue (1997) and Cholera (2012). Jailing those who warned the world of the threat.

Reality of Cuba's healthcare system

Cuba has a two tiered health care system one tier for the nomenklatura and foreign tourists with hard currency that offers care with modern equipment and fully stocked pharmacies, then there is a second tier which is for the rest with broken down equipment, run down buildings and rooms, scarce supplies, a lack of hygiene, the denial of certain services and lengthy wait times. Healthcare professionals are poorly paid and lack food.

In 1997 a Cuban doctor was silenced for warning about a deadly dengue epidemic. Dr Desi Mendoza Rivero, married with four children at the time, was arrested on June 25, 1997. On November 28, 1997 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for "enemy propaganda." Amnesty International declared Desi a prisoner of conscience and campaigned for his freedom. He was released on November 20, 1998 due to health reasons following the visit of the Spanish Foreign Minister,  under the condition that he go into exile in Spain.  First official report to the World Health Organization of the dengue outbreak was six months after initial identification made by the jailed and later forcibly exiled physician. Mendoza's reports were eventually confirmed. This episode would have a chilling effect on other doctors coming forward.

Three of the victims of exposure and hypothermia at Mazorra in 2010

On January 15, 2010 The New York Times reported the confirmed deaths of at least 20 mental patients at the Psychiatric Hospital in Cuba, known as Mazorra, due to "criminal negligence by a government characterized by its general inefficiency," a day later the Cuban government confirmed that 26 patients had died due to “prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees.”

News of a cholera outbreak in Manzanillo, in the east of the island, broke in El Nuevo Herald on June 29, 2012 thanks to the reporting of an independent reporter in the island. Calixto Martinez, the independent Cuban journalist who broke the story was jailed. The state controlled media did not confirm the outbreak until days later on July 3, 2012. The BBC reported on July 7, 2012 that a patient had been diagnosed with Cholera in Havana. The dictatorship stated that it had it under control and on August 28, 2012 said the outbreak was over. 

In July 2013 an Italian tourist returned from Cuba with severe renal failure due to Cholera. New York high school teacher Alfredo Gómez contracted cholera during a family visit to Havana during the summer of 2013 and was billed $4,700 from the government hospital. A total of 12 tourists were identified who had contracted cholera in Cuba.

On August 22, 2013 Reuters reported that Cuba was still struggling with cholera outbreaks in various provinces.  

On December 28, 2017 the Spanish news service EFE reported that the Castro regime had dismantled a network of medical officials and workers who'd adulterated a medicine for children made at the laboratories of the state-owned drug company BioCubaFarma. They replaced the active substance methylphenidate with a placebo substance in the manufacture of the drug marketed as "Ritalin." The active substance was sold on the black market. Nevertheless, the Miami Herald had an article touting the importance of importing drugs from Cuba on December 14, 2017.

The statistics and numbers that the international community has access to with relation to the Cuban healthcare system are manipulated by the dictatorship. Anthropologist Katherine Hirschfeld, in the book she authored, 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.

Mosquitos are the vector for Zika

Conflict of interests? Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Castro regime's relationship

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is being sued for conspiring "with the Cuban government to collect millions of dollars by unlawfully trafficking Cuban doctors to Brazil." (PAHO is the Regional Office for the Americas for the World Health Organization [WHO], and is recognized internationally as a part of the United Nations system.) According to a November 29, 2018 article by Frances Robles, in The New York Times, PAHO "made about $75 million off the work of up to 10,000 Cuban doctors who earned substandard wages in Brazil." 

Perhaps Mr. Zimmer and The New York Times should explore this relationship and the possibility that more than a glitch was involved in endangering the lives of thousands of travelers with the complicity of both the Cuban government and the Pan American Health Organization.

New Scientist reports: "Cuba failed to report thousands of Zika virus cases in 2017"

“I willingly accept Cassandra's fate To speak the truth, although believed too late.”- Anne Killigrew  (1685)

Fake news in Cuba? This is a PAHO chart from 2016 (Source: PAHO/WHO)

New Scientist reports today: "Cuba failed to report thousands of Zika virus cases in 2017" … Forgot to mention that the Castro regime in the recent past failed to report Dengue (1997) and Cholera (2012) outbreaks in Cuba. Jailing those who warned the world of the threat.

The publication New Scientist reported today in an exclusive report that "thousands of Zika virus cases went unreported in Cuba in 2017, according to an analysis of data on travelers to the Caribbean island. Veiling them may have led to many other cases that year." Founded in 1956, New Scientist is the world’s most popular weekly science and technology magazine.  The article should raise concerns for travelers to the island.

The analysis suggests that Zika infections peaked in Cuba in the second half of 2017, at a time when the virus was waning in mainland North and South America. Cuban authorities didn’t follow the agreed practice of notifying the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) of the outbreak. Cuba’s first case of Zika occurred in March 2016. A PAHO report says the country stopped providing updates on Zika in January 2017. In press reports in May 2017, Cuba said that nearly 1900 infections had been detected up to that point. But Nathan Grubaugh at the Yale School of Public Health and his colleagues estimate that the total cases in 2017 alone would have been more than double that at 5700.

Meanwhile, Cubanet published an interview today with Cuban independent journalist, Vladimir Turró, who was detained and threatened for attempting to investigate a case of medical negligence in which a baby died in a Cuban hospital. He was arrested Friday at 6:00pm and held until Sunday morning. He was interrogated and threatened constantly to abandon the story.

#CENSURA en #Cuba: El periodista independiente Vladimir Turró, detenido y amenazado por investigar una negligencia médica. #Video. pic.twitter.com/5SoTclVSjl

— Cubanet (@CubanetNoticias) January 8, 2019

Vladimir, and potentially his family, are in a dangerous situation. Other journalists have been jailed for months for reporting on health threats in Cuba. Independent journalist, Calixto Martinez, who reported on a cholera outbreak in Cuba on July 13, 2012, was imprisoned in September of 2012 in horrible conditions and only released in April of 2013 after Amnesty International had declared him a prisoner of conscience in January of 2013 and campaigned for his release. His offense? Informing the public about the Cholera threat and the poor government response.

Calixto Martinez jailed for 7 months for report on Cholera outbreak

However the silencing of voices reporting on healthcare threats is not limited to journalists. A Cuban doctor was sentenced to eight years in prison for warning about a deadly dengue epidemic in 1997. Dr Desi Mendoza Rivero, married with four children at the time, was arrested on June 25, 1997. On November 28, 1997 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for "enemy propaganda." Amnesty International declared Desi a prisoner of conscience and campaigned for his freedom. He was released on November 20, 1998 due to health reasons following the visit of the Spanish Foreign Minister,  under the condition that he leave the country and was exiled to Spain.

Official press announces no dengue epidemic in Cuba

None of this should be a surprise, but this reality is not often reported in the press. In August of 2016, this blog raised questions about the Cuban government's reporting of Zika cases and their economic motivation for not doing so in the midst of an outbreak.

"Consider that 3.5 million people visited Cuba in 2015 and tourism to the island in 2016 so far is 15 percent higher than last year. The crisis in Venezuela is impacting Cuba economically making tourism a priority source of hard income. In the past the regime has demonstrated a resistance to reporting or it has under-reported on the outbreaks of diseases in the island. The trouble is that the lack of transparency and the spread of the virus will pose a danger to tourists visiting the island who not being advised of the danger may return home as asymptomatic carriers of the virus spreading it in their country unknowingly."

On September 2, 2016 the Associated Press in the article "Cuba reports remarkable success in containing Zika virus," said that "six months after President Raul Castro declared war on the Zika virus in Cuba, a militarized nationwide campaign of intensive mosquito spraying, monitoring and quarantine appears to be working. Cuba is among the few countries in the Western Hemisphere that have so far prevented significant spread of the disease blamed for birth defects in thousands of children."

Now we know that the spread of Zika in Cuba peaked in the second half of 2017 and that the outbreak in Cuba was similar to other countries of similar size in 2016.  How did they find out, while the Castro regime failed to report?

"The team looked at the travel logs of 184 people who had contracted Zika while abroad and found that 95 per cent had been to Cuba. Such “hidden” outbreaks can spread epidemics to other countries because travelers and health authorities are unaware of the heightened risk of infection, the authors write (bioRxiv, doi.org/czdk)."

 Tragically, the consequences of this obfuscation of a health threat will become evident as babies, exposed to Zika during pregnancy,  are born "with an abnormally small head, a condition known as microcephaly."

Cholera patients in Cuba (CNN)

 On November 29, 2018 The New York Times reported that the  Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO) "made about $75 million off the work of up to 10,000 Cuban doctors who earned substandard wages in Brazil." A group of these Cuban medical doctors are now suing PAHO for the organization's alleged role in human trafficking.

This may also raise new questions on the relationship between PAHO, Cuba and reporting not only on outbreaks but the healthcare statistics that present the regime in a positive light.