QatzelOk wrote:Cuba offered to send Brazil's left-wing former government doctors, and there was an exchange of Brazilian workers in other needed fields sent to Cuba (like hotel builders). How does this make Cuba "a puppet," and what service is this "puppet" doing for the globalists?
The revolutionary governments of Cuba proposed revolutionary health care and revolutionary education. They now have excellent schools and lots of doctors for everyone, and they can even afford to lend some doctors to other poor nations to help out.
You judging of Cuba as "a shithole" and "abusive" ignores its capacity to be actually useful to other nations - to provide other things than propaganda and wars like the rich nations who suck the blood out of the rest of the world do.
Cuba is a shithole. It is not as much as a shithole as lets say Haiti, Guatemala or Ecuador but it is certainly a shithole. Cuba used to be a wonderfully advanced country with relatively high resources compared to its size before Fidel came into power. It’s wealth and influence have slowly come down in part due to the scaffolding created prior to fidel’s Revolution and later the pumping of resources into the island by the USSR. When the USSR came down that’s when Cuba really was at its worse. Since then the country had seen slight improvement, very slowly as the government has allowed the population to pursue more and more business ventures but it is FAR from being a half decent place. The “medicine” powerhouse that the government tries to portray is a utter sharade. While it is true that the doctors that were trained decades ago were amazing, as time goes own, the quality have decreased and evidence based medicine is far from ideal.
I certainly would not trust government reported infant/mother mortality for instance, further more these numbers are grossly inaccurate due to cultural difference regarding abortion. In Cuba, an abortion is neither illegal nor taboo so aborting a complicated or malformed fetus will mitigate a great deal of mortality for both the mother and fetus.
Medical equipment in Cuba is a neightmare. I don’t know if it has improved but 10 years ago, getting regular ultrasounds for a pregnancy was difficult even in Havana (capital) if you did not have the right connections. While in the US it is routine to have a few US through the pregnancy, that is not customary in Cuba simply because of lack of resources.
I come from a long family of Cuban doctors. My aunt is a doctor, my mother is a doctor. Because of this, my mother who worked in an obstetrician hospital in Cuba and had the connections, and my aunt had FAR above average care. Basically it was a pain in the ass to get my aunt ultrasounds, the fetus was in breach position and she had to go for a c-section. During the operation the OB doctor had to switch scalpels 3 times because each and everyone of them were dull. You’d see, in Cuba they were using autoclaved (e.g. recycled) scalpels and they lost their edge (my closin got a tiny nick on one of her buttocks as a result since the OB doctor kept using the dull blade forcefully and as result by accident my cousin got cut).
My grandfather used to be the director of one of the largest and most prestigious hospitals in Cuba. He died a few years ago and he was hospitalized in the very same hospital that he was once the director off. The doctors that were taking care of him were at some point in the past trained by either my grandfather, or by doctors that my grandfather taught. By any stretch of the imagination, my grandfather should have received the absolute best care that that hospital could provide. That “best care” boiled down to a shitty room, with water leak, rusted beds, no medications and no matress. My mother had to send the meds from the US to Cuba and had to pay someone to buy the matress. Also she had to pay for people to actually do nursing for my grandfather.
In any other country in the world, I would have lived in palace, since everyone in my family up to both of my grandparents were doctors (and like I said, my grandfather himself was kind of a big deal in Cuba). But that is not what actually happened as a doctor’s salary is not much higher than a policeman or garbage man. When my mother left Cuba she was doing short of $600 pesos per month which translate into $25 USD at that time, our electricity bill alone was close to $300pesos (we were lucky enough to have AC at home and thus the electricity bill was a little bit higher than average).
Education is not much better either. I have always appreciated education because my parents did a great job of teaching me but the Cuban government really does not deserve much credit either. My books were at the time 30-40 years old, recycled, from the USSR era. Keep in mind I was privileged as I lived in Havana, I can only imagine what people from the country would use but chances are not much better. Even those shitty, recycled old books were often not enough and sometimes we would have to share them.
I went to a boarding school. When my friends here in the US hear this, they think it was some kind of rich and powerful fancy school. It was not. It was a school in the country and the idea was that students (high-schoolers) would work for half of the day in the country planting or collecting crops and then go to class the other half of the day. The theory was “work forge a man” and I’m paraphrasing but that is what the government ideologically used to justify this. In practice I believe they just wanted inexpensive labor and a sort of population control (e.g. high schoolers tend to be problematics in any country, at this time is when some start doing crimes, drugs and perhaps this was a way to mitigate this problem by separating them from family and putting them in a vulnerable position.
I went to boarding school for 2 years prior to coming to the US. The “meals” were white rice and some vegetables and some old bread. Sometimes they would have beans. For fluids always water, WARM water (no fridge in boarding school). We would sleep in large hangars with bunk beds, 70 or so of us living in the same large hangar-sized room. No privacy what so ever. Our “restroom” was a large room split in half and half the room was showers (only 3-4 would work) and the other half had 3-4 toilets all of which were permanently clogged and would only sometimes flush if you threw a bucket of water at it (no high schooler takes the time to throw a bucket of water at a toilet after pooping) as a result they would often be filled with 6-7 students poop at all times. Most students would actually prefer to go to the open field (since we were in the countryside) and poop on the ground or something. I myself developed the ability of only poop once per week (we were allowed to return home during weekends, so I could poop at home peacefully during weekends).
The transport from the city to the school was at the beginning by train. During the first year, one of those trains de-railed, there were a few deaths. High schoolers, dead because the fking government put them in a shitty safety train to exports them to work in the country side with sub-human conditions. How many times did this was reported over the news? Over the radio? Maybe on a tiny footnote on the newspaper? No... never reported. I don’t know how many accidents like this happened because in Cuba that Is not reported. Maybe this was the only one (although I doubt it) of such magnitude but more likely than not it was not and simply they just go unreported. The transport that moved students from the actual building to the fields where we were supposed to work was a large flat-bed truck. My class group was large, and usually they would use 3 trucks for the movements. One time there was only 1 truck available and the “boss” forced the students to cramp into the flatbed truck... about 60+ students packed very tightly on the back of a truck, on bad roads of the country side. Off course, halfway through the trip, the door in the back snapped and 20+ of so students felt from a moving truck into the asphalt. Many of my friends were injured. Fractured pelvis, fractured femurs and fractured arms.
One of my best friends, he used to sleep in my bunk bed below me. Onetime he did some kind of prank (I believe he was dancing on a bridge that connected the two building complex during an afternoon that was raining, nothing really serious but was not allowed). As punishement he was put on duty to clean the areas around the school (garbage pickup). One day he woke up at 5am to do this job, touched some kind of exposed wire (because infrastructure is so fking bad in Cuba) got electrocuted and died. 16 year, nice guy always smiling and good person died.
This was one of the shittiest experiments ever done by Cuba. This went for decades (my father also attended one of these schools 30 years prior to me. This went on for a very long time and my understanding is that a few years ago this stoped and Cuban students no longer have to go to boarding schools. I don’t know how it works now, hopefully it is much better.
Teachers? When I was in middle and high school there was a severe shortage of teachers. First they tried to “import” teachers from the east (oriental) side of the country. This brings me into a very interesting point. I bet you did not know that people born in the east side of Cuba were considered “illegals” in the capital, and they would not be allowed to work or even come into the capital and if caught they would be sent back to “Oriente”. Imagine that, you were born in New York, and if you got caught in Texas they would arrest you and deport you back to New York. Because of this, every time there was a shortage of work personnel in Havana, they would often “Import” them from the oriental side of the country. During a period, the government brought “teachers” from Santiago de Cuba to teach into the schools in Havana. This was atrocious, for one, Havana people hate people from Santiago and sees them as dumb and uneducated and also oriental people also feel inferior because they have been mistreated for decades. So what could go wrong when you put a bunch of misbehaved hormonal teenagers to being taught by someone who is considered (unfairly) as inferior? If you guessed “A freaking mess” you are correct. Furthermore, this was not even close enough as a solution, so the government later implemented a different strategy. Instead of actually having teachers teach in classes, they started recoding “lectures” and would later broadcast them during school hours “tele-education” if you will. So, for many-most of my classes, the teacher was a 20” CRT TV with poor reception, poor audio that was 20’ away from me (I am kind of tall so I was destined to sit at the back of the class). As you can imagine, this makes for no education at all.
If my US family did not send my family in Cuba US $$ so that my parents could take me to private lessons, today my education would be shit.
So when you talk about Cuban “excellent doctors” and education I think you are clearly very uninformed of what is actually going there.
Do me a favor, next time you have the urge to imply Cuba is great, sell all your properties and move to the island and get back to me in 10 years with what you think.
Now, this is not to say that there are not good things from Cuba.The truth is there are many great things. People there have great character and integrity. But please don’t come with your i’ll Informed propaganda either. You can probably tell from my other posts that I am not some kind of right-winger. In fact I am a very liberal guy and I see many progressive ideas favorable but Cuba is not an example of liberalism or even socialism. Cuba is a sort of left-wing fascism. The government is authoritarian and abuses the people.
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- By Saeko
- By litwin