Cuba - small country BIG HEALTHCARE

How nice that Cubans have great health care. I'm sure that is really important to the thousands of political prisoners that Fidel has locked away. Nice to know everyone is healthy while they are being arrested for expressing their views. Fidel's Cuba is an oppressive police state where no dissent is allowed. But they have great health care. Woo hoo.

If you think America doesn't hold political prisoners, too, you're deluded. America is even holding political prisoners on Cuban soil.

But be that as it may, it's not the issue. It's a crude attempt to divert your attention from the dismal state of American health care and education.

But hey, consider the source.

"Thousands of Political Prisoners"
You right-wing nut cases ought to get your facts straight. You keep trying to make Cuba in 2004 look like the dark night of Moscow in 1937.

The issue here is healrh care and not the cuban political prisoners. How can the the United States which highest in %GNP sprnt on healthcare, rank 35th in health care services provided? The answer is simple "Capitalism". A little over 3e0% of the healthcare insurrance goes to cover administrative costs and in the price of HMO's the cost is still higher. Those 'cost cutting' administrative procedures that executives love to promote cost plenty to administrate. In the US, we have taken control of medicine ot of the hands of the Drs and placed it into thew hands of the insurrance companies. Is it any wonder our medical system is so fucked up.

Health Care in Cuba is not entirely free. It is funded by a 12% payroll tax on all Cubans.

Also, there have been recent revelations about some issues involving the Cuban health care system. See the article (in Spanish) here, or in English a href="http://www.babalublog.com/archives/001470.html">here, about a hospital Fidel Castro called "one of the most modern and best ones in the country".

There are some more Cuban hospital pictures here.

Opinion
Pressure Puppeteer: A Cuban Invention
Federico Jiménez Losantos

«There are no missing people in Cuba? And how many have disappeared in the Florida Straits, eaten by sharks or shot in the night, murdered in their boats, rafts or dinghies by Castro's henchmen?»

The pressure cooker is a minor invention in the amazing history of Castro’s tyranny. By his side, Valle-Inclán’s “Tirano banderas” is like if Seneca told the story of Cincinnati. Like the cheese pipeline for carrying tons of gruyère to the Ubre Blanca (a cow that produced lots of milk Cuban scientists were trying to clone) and pigs surgically stripped of their voices, real socialism in Cuba is the history of human stupidity splattered with blood. But there is something is even more morally reprehensible than Cuban tyranny and its uniformed killers, its torturers, its jailors and its neighborhood squealers: the stable of intellectuals, mainly novelists and singers, that before one can utter a critical word of the world’s biggest prison jump to defend the jailer. Lately, the hardening of Castro’s regime and the legion of Europeans that justify it, has reached grotesque levels.

Neither the UN nor the EU have voted on the island’s lack of human rights and we already find in the press a letter signed by Castro-phile puppeteers attacking the US or whoever they are instructed to attack. But the letter is written with such craven political submission and intellectual clumsiness that it could only be the work of frightened civil servants and bored-to-death communist artists lying about their luxurious mansions. Singers like Sabina, Aute and other defenders of political crimes in Cuba now say there has never been a single case of torture, murder or people gone missing during Castro’s reign. And they have the gall to say this only hours after the SIP reported twenty something journalists were sent to prison simply for trying to do their job. Of course, they are being treated with Castro’s customary delicacy, a tradition dating back to when Che the Butcher arrived in Cabaña in 1959 and started executing Cubans. There are no missing people in Cuba? And how many have disappeared in the Florida Straits, eaten by sharks or shot in the night, fathers and sons cruelly murdered in their home spun boats, rafts or dinghies by Castro’s henchmen? If they were not so disgusting, these defenders of torture, pseudo-freedom and massive murder would be funny. Thousands executed two million exiled, hundreds of thousands of missing in an island of eleven million and they still insist on proclaiming the greatness of the regime.

The Caribbean tyrant must be given credit for one thing: he did not invent the pressure cooker, but the pressure puppeteer: a Soviet Barbie doll that signs whatever petitions are put in front of it as long as it is anti-American.

http://spainherald.com/416.html

BIG HEALTHCARE

NO, not since the USSR left them high and dry.
this article is just wishful thinking from some disgruntled health care worker.

Now there is not even enough food and the people are undernourrished.

> Are those "political prisoners", enjailed for expressing their opinions or critizising the US government?

Sefarad is begging the question here. in fact, expressing one's opinions or critizising the US government are not the only ways to become a political prisoner.

The majority of the prisoners at Gitmo, for example, are prisoners of war who were captured while defending their country from a foreign invader.

In fact, however, we don't know why are being held. They have never been charged with crimes. Evidence of their guilt has not been presented, let alone judged by a jury of their peers. Rule of law is not the case here. Either way, justice can only be served is if each and every individual is considered innocent until proven guilty. Anything else is un-American. It also sets a very bad precedent. In a world where the government can imprison people forever, without having to tell, let alone prove, why it’s being done, you could be next. Anyone of us could be next. Remember Abu Ghraib, where by the US government’s own admission, the majority of the prisoners at the time of the famous photographs were in there my mistake. How would you like it if you were picked up by mistake some day and imprisoned, even tortured, indefinitely, with no chance of ever proving your innocence? Is this a world you want to live in? Is this what democracy looks like? Is this a precedent we really want to be allowed to be set?

Do not forget: Castro holds 300 political prisoners say Cuban Democrats

The democratic Cuban opposition has highlighted its his dramatic situation under Castro´s dictatorship. The Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation has reported that there are almost 300 political prisoners in Cuban jails, 70 of them “prisoners of conscience” according to Amnesty International. This group, led by human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez, pointed out that during 2004 in Cuba at least 21 new people were imprisoned for political motives.

José Luis García Paneque, Cuban journalist, who has been enjailed for two years, can die, reported Journalists without Frontiers.

García Paneque, 39, director of the independent agency "Libertad", who is serving a 24-year sentence, "is in a state of extreme undernourrishment" and "he won't survive if he is kept in jail", where "he doesn't receive the necessary healthcare and food". The disident has lost 40 kilos since he was imprisoned.

http://libertaddigital.com/noticias/noticia_1276246992.html

http://www.iri.org/cubanprisoners/allprisoners.asp

http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/estoria.presidio.html

http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/prison.html

http://havanajournal.com/politics_comments/A812_0_5_0_M/

http://havanajournal.com/politics_comments/A829_0_5_0_M/

http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engAMR250401999?OpenDocument&of=COUNTRIES%5CCUBA

AN URGENT CALL TO THE DEMOCRATIC GOVERMENTS OF THE WORLD

The repressive situation described above leads us to the conclusion that the most basichuman rights are being violated to the Cuban people, all the time. Undoubtly conditions will worsen as malnutrition and even hunger reach the highest levels and epidemics continue to develop. Efforts to escape the island will persist in spite of restrictions imposed by the U.S., which since 1995 has been delivering into Castro's hands those who have tried to flee that totalitarian hell. The rafters realize they can do nothing to change the destiny of their homeland and to them it seems preferable to die trying to escape than to continue living under that system. The number of suicides can be expected to rise even further.

More

http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/juanclark.cuba/clark97.humrtscond.html