This is a abbreviated version published today in the Tampa Bay Times responding to a November 30th column backing the quarantine of Cubans with HIV between 1986 and 1997 as a successful policy. The long version was published in this blog on November 30, 2019.
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| Health Ministry employees paint AIDS/HIV virus awareness mural in Cuba [J GOITIA | Canadian Press] |
Gay rights and Cuba’s bad record
Cuban HIV response saved lives | Column, Nov. 30
This
column omits both Fidel Castro’s persecution of gay people over decades
and Cuba’s faking of epidemic statistics. In 1964 Fidel and Raul Castro
rounded up gay people and sent them to Military Units to Aid Production
(UMAP), forced labor camps for those suspected of “improper conduct.”
Cubans with effeminate mannerisms, what Castro called “extravagant
behavior,” were interned.
The 1986-1997 quarantine of HIV-positive Cubans must be considered in this context. Furthermore, claims that AIDS
rates are lower in Cuba should be met with skepticism when considering
the dictatorship’s failure to accurately report outbreaks.
In
1997 when dengue broke out, Castro 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.
Castro eventually recognized that there had been a dengue epidemic.
A
2012 cholera outbreak demonstrated how the Cuban public health system
operates. News of the outbreak broke on June 29, 2012, thanks to
reporting by journalist Calixto Martinez. He too was jailed.
Thousands
of Zika virus cases went unreported in 2017, according to an analysis of
data on travelers to Cuba, which said “veiling them may have led to
many other cases that year.” 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.”
Worse yet, prisoner of conscience Ariel Ruiz Urquiola accused the Cuban government last week of inoculating him with HIV while in its custody in 2018. Castro-ism’s track record of
repressing gay people, faking health statistics and covering up
epidemics is nothing to celebrate.
John Suarez, Falls Church, Va.
The writer is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.
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