Friday, May 1, 2020

Uncomfortable truths about Cuban healthcare, doctors and the Castro regime's dangerous claims about COVID-19

Recovering information from the memory hole.
A Jamaican medical student in Cuba said this is all the food she has left
Forty Jamaican medical students in Cuba are pleading with the Jamaican government to come home, "claiming that food shortages, xenophobia, and limited sanitisation products continue to threaten their mental and physical health. The students said that the COVID-19 pandemic has further compounded the shortages. Jamaica closed its borders to incoming passenger traffic on March 24 to curb the spread of the new coronavirus. Ports will remain closed until May 31, except for Cabinet-approved exemptions. But the expats studying in Cuba said that they may not survive till then."

Jamaican diplomats are reaching out to those in need and getting "food and sanitation supplies" to the students, "including getting a food shipment from Suriname."

This was not supposed to be that way.

Castro regime officials falsely claimed throughout February and March that Cuba was a safe harbour with effective treatments for Wuhan Virus for visiting tourists.

Officials refused to close schools, or take other precautions, Cubans desperately began to take steps on their own against the pandemic, having learned about it on the internet. Teachers, ignoring the regime's orders, closed schools and sent children home. The Catholic church, aware of the danger presented by public gatherings, suspended religious services. Cuba’s beleaguered independent journalists raised the alarm while the official media insisted that the country was prepared for the epidemic, that tourists were welcomed while the pandemic ran its course elsewhere. Officials said that Cuba’s sun was “a good antidote” and continued to advertise their false claims on social media targeting European and North American audiences.

On March 19, 2020 the official media reported, "authorities of the Cuban ministry of tourism (MINTUR) submitted the prevention and control plan to tackle COVID-19, and stated that the country is "ready to receive those customers who decide to come to the island of their own free will."
Barbara Cruz, marketing director of MINTUR, said at a press conference that "Cuba has a strong health system and trained workers, including the self-employed ones."

Five days later the government closed its borders to foreigners and banned Cuban citizens from leaving the island. All flights to and from Cuba were suspended at midnight on Wednesday, April 1, 2020. Thousands of tourists were left stranded, in conditions that have led many of them to cry out for their home governments to fly them out. A group of stranded Dutch kids in Cuba ended up sailing back to the Netherlands.

Toronto Life published an account of a family of four who were stranded in Cuba. Sono Motomayo, the author of the piece, described how they were treated: "Meanwhile, the Cuban government had been herding all foreign tourists toward Havana and into government lodging. Our Airbnb host, due to gentle pressure from the Cuban government, had rejected out of hand any possibility of returning to his apartment. With little time for research, we ended up choosing a rundown government-owned hotel with the ominous name El Vedado (“The Forbidden”) and were placed in a dingy room with two double beds and an air conditioner that sounded like a failing jet engine. We were forbidden to leave the building."

This past weekend 300 American citizens and residents were flown from Cuba to Miami in special charter flights arranged by the State Department.

The European Union has also been arranging charter flights to get hundreds of European nationals back home.


Meanwhile, headlines around the world report that Cuban doctors are arriving in medical missions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but in Cuba their negligence continues to claim lives.

Cuban doctors sent around the world by the Castro dictatorship, their passports kept by the regime, families not allowed to join them, if they decide to stay are banned from returning to Cuba for eight years, they get 5-10% of the earnings while the Castro kleptocracy keeps the rest. It is human trafficking, but another question arises: are they all healthcare workers? 

ADN Cuba published the above photos and a video interview below of Liset Herrera, a Cuban mother denouncing the death of Iker, her 12 year old son, due to medical negligence.


News reports reveal the true nature of the Cuban healthcare system from time to time but the articles seem to disappear down a memory hole, and international organizations that should know better like the World Health Organization (WHO) and its American affiliate the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) aid and abet in the white wash.

The Psychiatric Hospital in Havana run by Eduardo Bernabe Ordaz Ducunge for forty years used the tools of psychiatry to torture dissidents and human rights defenders. Despite this history, the PAHO in 1997 awarded Ordaz Ducunge its prize for administration "for his pioneering efforts in establishing rehabilitation programs and in the humanization of hospital care for people suffering from chronic mental illness."
Three of 26 patients who died of exposure in 2010 in Cuba

In 1991 Freedom House and Of Human Rights published The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba (1991) by Charles J. Brown and Armando M. Lago that reported on the political abuse of psychiatry in Cuba under the Castro regime, but this well documented evidence did not prevent PAHO from awarding the Cuban in charge of that abomination. Thirteen years later in January 2010 pictures smuggled out of the Psychiatric Hospital revealed that patients were dying of exposure to the elements, and had suffered greatly through their time there. Claudia Cadelo, now exiled out of Cuba, wrote in 2010 her reaction to seeing this photos:
When I opened the little folder called “Mazorra” a series of monstrosities hit me in the face and I couldn’t stop looking at the cruel graphic testimony. A friend who is a doctor visited and while he analyzed images I didn’t have the courage to look at, expressions like, “Holy Virgin Mary, Blessed God, What in God’s name is this?” issued from his outraged throat, mixed with obscure pathologies and the names of diseases both treatable and curable. Enormous livers, tubercular lungs, and wormy intestines are the proof, Senora Arlin, of the sacredness of life in Cuba. Meanwhile The Roundtable throws a fit because the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo has unmasked a crumbling public health system, and they try to cover up the disgrace of seeing soldiers dragging and beating a group of women dressed in white with flowers in their hands. I ask myself, Gentlemen Journalists, when will they explain to Cubans the reasons why twenty-six mentally incapacitated people died in inhumane conditions during their confinement in Mazorra?
The dictatorship was forced to acknowledge what had happened thanks to the still unknown whistleblower and courageous independent journalists who made the images public and The New York Times reported on January 15, 2020 that "26 patients at a mental hospital died during a cold snap this week, the government said Friday. A Health Ministry communiqué blamed “prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees." This is the institution that Eduardo Bernabe Ordaz Ducunge shaped over 40 years, and that PAHO celebrated with an award. This episode was quickly forgotten, and the mantra of Cuba's "great" health care system continued to be repeated in the press.

Just as the Castro regime's cover up of a Zika outbreak in 2017 led to many tourists being infected with the virus and not knowing that they had it when they went back home. Or other outbreaks of dengue in 1997 and cholera in 2012 that we know about because a journalist and a doctor spoke out and went to prison for breaking their silence. Yet, many today continue to believe the data provided by the Castro regime in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

They also fail to listen to the cries of Liset Herrera, a Cuban mother denouncing the death of her 12 year old son Iker, and ignore their existence in order to continue believing the lies of a totalitarian dictatorship. Lies that are now not only causing the deaths of Cubans but possibly of many others around the world during this pandemic.

Why is it that Costa Rica and Canada's healthcare systems rate higher than the U.S. on international indices, but are not mentioned positively as often as Cuba's despite the island nation's health care system rating lower than the United States?

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