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?