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?

Cuba and China: A tale of two viral outbreaks

Trouble with China, North Korea, Cuba, and other communist dictatorships is that mendacity is part of their ideology, and there is no counterbalance in a totalitarian regime to hold them to account in the midst of an outbreak of disease.

Regimes in China and Cuba both seek political advantage in viral outbreaks

Pandemics have been with us throughout human history, but totalitarian regimes are a recent phenomenon. Both Cuba and China are totalitarian regimes and have a common playbook, and it can be seen with their responses to two recent viral outbreaks. It does not put people first, but the interests of their respective dictatorships.

First, let us briefly examine these two viruses and then how Cuban and Chinese officials responded to each of them.

Zika virus was identified in the Ziika Forest of Uganda in 1947 and spent decades spreading eastward through Asia and reaching the Americas with a major outbreak in 2015 -2017 that reached Cuba.

Zika virus

The Wuhan virus (SARS-CoV-2) the cause of a mysterious viral pneumonia cluster that first emerged in mid-November 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei province was identified in December 2019 and has now spread around the world in the span of a few months.

Wuhan virus

Responses by Cuba and China although at different ends of a viral outbreak, with different characteristics, including mortality and rate of spread, are similar in how regimes covered up the severity of the epidemic in their respective countries, punishing whistleblowers, and with the aid of international organizations and media outlets preserving the narrative that they are competent administrators with an effective response to a viral outbreak.

The Cuban response to Zika 2015- 2017
Countries across the Western hemisphere reported outbreaks of Zika to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 - 2016 and travel advisories were issued. A WHO map showed Caribbean islands surrounding Cuba all having some level of a Zika outbreak, but Cuba remained clear.

 February 2, 2016: The Nation published “Zika Is Circling Cuba. What Will Happen When It Lands?” by Greg Grandin that also contained the subtitle “Cuba’s public-health campaigns are famously aggressive—but so is the Zika virus.” The author mentions that “[o]ver in Cuba, Zika has yet to make an appearance. It’s circling. There have been cases in Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands.”

The Nation author did not mention that the Cuban government in 1997 covered up a dengue outbreak, jailing a Cuban doctor who had gone public for “enemy propaganda.” Amnesty International provided additional detail on what had happened.

Dr  Desi  Mendoza  Rivero,  president of the Santiago  de  Cuba  Independent  Medical  Association, ... had been detained on 25 June 1997 in Santiago de Cuba, after making statements, which were disseminated by foreign media, about an epidemic of dengue fever in Santiago de Cuba  which,  according  to  him,  had  caused  several  deaths.  He  reportedly  accused  the authorities  of  covering  up  the  true  extent  of  the  epidemic  and  of  not  taking  sufficient measures to control it. He was brought to trial on 18 November 1997 and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, charged with "enemy propaganda."

Instead the magazine article claimed that “when dengue and chikungunya began to spread, the government stepped up its efforts at vector control, committed to contain any outbreak that might scare visitors away.” Grandin should read Katherine Hirschfeld's Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898, to obtain a fresh perspective from an academic.

February 23, 2016: Raul Castro announced that he was dispatching the Cuban military to keep Zika out of Cuba, and that the island had yet to report a single case of the disease.

September 2, 2016: The Associated Press reported on the regime’s containment efforts. “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. Only three people have caught Zika in Cuba.”

August 2, 2017: The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene published the paper “Why Did Zika Not Explode in Cuba?” citing “Cuba’s early and successful response to Zika, grounded in the country’s long-standing dengue prevention and control program, serves as a model of rapid mobilization of intersectoral efforts.” It also ignored reports that Cuba had jailed doctors and covered up prior epidemics.

News stories of Zika transmissions with a Cuba link should have raised questions. The first case of sexually transmitted Zika reported to the Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County on August 1, 2017 was by a person whose partner had returned from Cuba with Zika symptoms.

January 2019: The New Scientist broke the news 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."

Microcephaly is a birth defect associated with Zika

Yale School of Public Health’s Nathan Grubaugh and his colleagues estimated that the total cases of Zika in Cuba in 2017 alone would have been 5,700, and added that the “2017 Zika outbreak in Cuba was similar in size to the known 2016 outbreaks in countries with similar population sizes.”

Duane Gubler at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore said “Cuba has a history of not reporting epidemics until they become obvious, and Zika is only mildly symptomatic in adults.” Zika can trigger paralysis (Guillain-Barré Syndrome), and in pregnant women, it may cause subsequent and severe birth defects in their babies such as microcephaly (abnormally small heads and brains that can require life-long specialized care).

Did the World Health Organization (WHO) call the Castro regime to account for this failure in reporting or address the dismal state of healthcare for the average Cuban?

Honored to join President Miguel Díaz-Canel for the opening of #CubaSalud2018. Visiting #Cuba reminds me that #HealthForAll is not a dream for the future, it’s not just an aspiration; it’s a reality now. Cuba es un ejemplo para el mundo. ¡Queremos y tendremos #SaludParaTodos! pic.twitter.com/nfP82LrYNV

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) April 24, 2018

The Chinese response to Wuhan virus 2019-2020
Caixin Media Company Ltd., a Beijing-based media group founded in 2010, has been pushing the limits of free speech in China with hard hitting investigative journalism that has taken a hard look at how the response to the Wuhan virus initially unfolded.

The chronology of what happened from mid-November 2019 through February 1st is taken primarily from their reporting.

Initial case of Wuhan virus was traced back to November 17, 2019.

Test results from multiple labs in December 2019 suggested there was an outbreak of a new virus with an “alarming similarity to the deadly SARS coronavirus that killed nearly 800 people between 2002 and 2003.”

Chinese doctors and scientists who were investigating the outbreak and warning of the danger were silenced and told to destroy samples, cease releasing test results and information about them. Those who continued to speak out suffered the consequences.

December 30, 2019: Dr. Li Wenliang “was one of several in Wuhan who sounded the first alarms and released initial evidence online. Li, who was punished by the Chinese government for releasing the information, allegedly perished from the Wuhan virus five weeks later.”

Dr. Li Wenliang

January 1, 2020: An official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered companies that were sequencing genomes of samples from Wuhan related to the new disease be stopped, the samples destroyed, and to “immediately cease releasing test results and information about the tests.”

Whistle-blowers arrested for warning about SARS-CoV-2

January 3, 2020: China’s National Health Commission (NHC), the communist regime’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish information related to the Wuhan virus, “and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The order, which Caixin has seen, did not specify any designated testing institutions.”

January 9, 2020: Chinese authorities announced that a novel coronavirus was behind Wuhan’s viral pneumonia outbreak. Transmissibility of the virus was downplayed, leaving the public unaware of the imminent danger.

January 11, 2020: Wuhan Municipal Health Commission resumed updating infection cases of the new virus after suspending reports for several days. But the government repeated its claim that there had been no medical worker infections and that there was no evidence of human transmission, and reported that the number of confirmed cases had dropped to 41.

January 14, 2020 WHO reports no evidence of human to human transmission

According to Ho-fung Hung, Professor in Political Economy at the Department of Sociology & School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in his article "Holding Beijing Accountable For The Coronavirus Is Not Racist" published in the Journal of Political Risk,"Genetic sequencing research shows that the first cases of Coronavirus in Europe and the US entered from China as early as mid-January when Beijing was still busy covering up about the disease and assuring the world nothing serious was going on."

January 20, 2020: Zhong Nanshan, a leading authority on respiratory health who came to national attention in his role fighting SARS, confirmed in a TV interview that the disease was spreading from person-to-person.

Two days later, Wuhan, a city of 11 million, was placed in lockdown.

January 23, 2020: World Health Organization (WHO), that had based its response on reports provided by the Chinese government, said “novel coronavirus is not a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).”

January 30, 2020: WHO declared the Wuhan Virus a PHEIC, but continued to defend the Chinese response as exemplary, despite the previous months cover-up and spread of the virus around the world.

I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak of #2019nCoV, not because of what is happening in #China, but because of what is happening in other countries.https://t.co/HNrxyGeoBA

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 30, 2020

On February 3, Xi Jinping in a speech to the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee emphasized the importance of “taking the initiative to influence international opinion” about the epidemic. "Since then," according to Professor Ho-fung Hung of Johns Hopkins University, "Chinese official media has been diligently criticizing foreign governments’ vigilance against the disease as overreaction and racism.. Ironically, Beijing chastised foreign governments for restricting travelers from China while it was itself putting tens of millions of Chinese citizens in lockdown."

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying "spread the misleading and unscientific notion that that the Coronavirus was less severe than the common flu in the US."  This shifted, but even a month later on March 4, 2020 the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman continued to talked down the severity of the outbreak, "The fact is that according to media reports, the 2009 H1N1 flu had a mortality rate of 17.4%. The mortality rate of MERS of 2012 was 34.4% and Ebola 40.4%. With China’s unrelenting efforts, the 2019-nCoV mortality rate in China is about 2.1%, much lower than the figures above. Since February 1, cured cases began to outnumber deaths. As of 12am February 3, a total of 632 patients have been cured and discharged. We have the confidence and the capability to win this battle."

Marcus Kolga in the March 20th essay "When will the Chinese government be held accountable for the spread of coronavirus?" raises a number of issues which are cited below with minor changes.

In contrast, Taiwan identified the outbreak and banned flights from Hubei before the end of 2019.
China did not identify the outbreak or limit flights until late January. During that time span five million people left Hubei, and the disease spread throughout China and the world.

Had China acted when Taiwan took action, the spread of the virus could have been reduced by 95 per cent. Thousands of lives, in China and around the world, would have been saved had China’s regime put aside its politics and acted swiftly.

Both the regimes in Cuba and China covered up the spread of viral outbreaks in their countries endangering lives to maintain the false narrative of superior health care. The two examples listed below are the most recent, but there have been others by both China and Cuba.

They continue to push these narratives in the midst of a global pandemic that may cost tens of millions of lives, and too many are willing to repeat their lies guaranteeing continued wrongdoing.

In many ways, #China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it. #2019nCoVhttps://t.co/GdUQZGvzkd

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 30, 2020

More examples of this "new standard of outbreak response" and archeologists of a future sentient species on Earth will be wondering how Homo Sapiens went extinct in the early 21st century.

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.

Examining Cuba and North Korea healthcare claims

"Communist political violence flowed from a utopian vision of the future, from the great goals pursued, and from the intolerance the service of these ideals inspired, as well as from an intense attachment to power. The means had to be subordinated to historically unparalleled ends that require extraordinary measures." - Paul Hollander, The Distinctive Features of Repression in Communist States

Regimes in Cuba and North Korea are totalitarian allies

 

Both Cuba and North Korea are totalitarian dictatorships that have made claims of great achievements in the area of healthcare over the course of the past month.

On June 19, 2015 the regime in North Korea said that it had "created a wonder drug which not only cures AIDS, but also eradicates Ebola and cancer."  At the same time North Korea has approximately 10.2 million North Koreans currently facing famine.

On June 30, 2015 the World Health Organization said that the regime in Cuba had "became the first country in the world to receive validation from WHO that it has eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis." This is the same regime in Cuba that tried to cover up or under report dengue and cholera outbreaks jailing doctors and reporters who warned of the outbreaks at the time in order to preserve a false image of its healthcare system. The dictatorship has not reported any new cholera cases since September 2014 but according to the Public Health Agency of Canada the government of Canada reported a case of cholera in a traveler who returned from Cuba in January of 2015. Tourists have been stuck with the bill in Cuba after contracting cholera on vacation.

When evaluating the above claims by both dictatorships it is important to recall the nature of these type of regimes. The website Boundless which seeks to provide a "cloud powered education" gives a complete definition of totalitarianism which includes the following observation:

"Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through all-encompassing propaganda campaigns (disseminated through the state-controlled mass media), a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror"

Now the claim made by the regime in North Korea was ridiculed by the mainstream press and shows that the regime is not as sophisticated in its propaganda messaging as their Cuban counterparts.

The regime in Cuba used the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote a false narrative of the Cuban healthcare system exploiting a misleading validation process which the WHO described on their website:

"As treatment for prevention of mother-to-child-transmission is not 100% effective, elimination of transmission is defined as a reduction of transmission to such a low level that it no longer constitutes a public health problem. An international expert mission convened by PAHO/WHO visited Cuba in March 2015 to validate the progress toward the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. During a five-day visit, members visited health centers, laboratories, and government offices throughout the island, interviewing health officials and other key actors. ... The validation process paid particular attention to the upholding of human rights, in order to ensure that services were provided free of coercion and in accordance with human rights principles."

Before anyone travels to a totalitarian regime they should first read Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society if they do not want to be manipulated.  This book studies and catalogs the strategies and tactics that these regimes use to control what one sees visiting their respective countries and what the unintended consequences are for its victims: i.e. the people who have to live there. Katherine Hirschfeld, an anthropologist, in Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 who spent a lot longer than five days in Cuba studying the healthcare system, contracted dengue while there experiencing first had the 'discrepancies between rhetoric and reality,' She observed a repressive, bureaucratized and secretive system, long on 'militarization' and short on patients' rights. 

These false or exaggerated healthcare claims are a central element to both totalitarian regimes' justification for continuing their repressive systems and hanging on to power using "extraordinary measures."