(Note: this was my very first blog attempt. Long and pedantic, I have been tempted to edit it over the years, but haven't. Cuba is its essence. Cuban health care especially. Politics aside.)
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Fulcrum of the Americas. Conscience of the Caribbean. Oracle to the mighty. Salve for the downtrodden. Foil for fools. Mote in Helms-Burton’s eye. Fidel's Cuba.
At the very peak of the Yankee debate over health insurance, I got sick ... in Cuba. Not just any Cuba, mind you, but rural Cuba. Poor Cuba. Reportedly downtrodden, oppressed, repressed, obsessed and Marxist-Leninized Cuba. Cracks in the walls, peeling paint, light bulbs in only every fourth fixture, typical, tropical, third-world hospital Cuba. Right?
Bullshit!
What an unmitigated pack of lies we are being fed about that island.
The North American public square, our commons, our most basic democratic vocabulary has been so hijacked by the purveyors of vested interest and pre-suppositional lies, we no longer accurately perceive ‘other’. Choking on venemous Helms-Burton narratives about Fidel for fifty years, we can no longer taste Cuba herself. Now eighty-four years old, Castro has spent the same fifty years studying us as we have studying him, yet we dare not admit the bugger might have some useful insights to offer.
Was it Marshall McLuhan who defined unilingual English-speaking North America’s approach to ‘other’ as: “Quick! Let me help you before you drown,” said the monkey to the fish, putting him safely up a tree.
What is this primordial soup in which we are so obliviously immersed?
Twenty-two minutes of every North American broadcast hour are devoted to advertising. Eighty-six percent of that comes from only two corporate alliances: the chemo-pharma-petro-food block (GM-Splenda-Cialis) and the banking-insurance-investment cartel. The remaining thirty-eight minutes of every hour reinforce that brainwashing with an endless recitation of partisan ‘talking points’ scripted with floods of cash from those same two lobbies.
Are you listening English-speaking America? We are being lied to about Cuba!
The embargo has little to do with the USA preventing goods from crossing the Florida straights. That's the Helms-Burton embargo. The Cuban embargo is run by Cubans, designed to shelter their airwaves from most of our seditious vitriol.
How bad is it? When Fareed Zakaria recently asked Paul Volker what worried him most about this era after his long and distinguished life, Volker replied, “Governance.”
Even the usually attentive Zakaria misunderstood at first. “Government?”, he asked. “No,” Volker replied, “Governance.” Our democracy is broken. We are a failing state.
Volker is not alone. Other prominent public figures see it too, but they use polite words like "gridlock” to describe it. None dares speak the truth, bluntly. That lies are corrupting the very essence of democratic choice.
Eisenhower saw it coming in 1950. He called it the military-industrial complex. Today its a Pharma-Financial complex. Our electoral system has been hijacked. Our elections are fixed because we vote based on those lies.
What's the difference between Zimbabwe and us? In Zimbabwe a corrupt tyrant falsifies the results after the vote. In twenty-first century North America disembodied concentrations of obscene wealth manipulate our thinking beforehand.
Obama knew it. And he blew it. He wasted a year droning drearily on about something called "health care reform". What a crock. The ‘public option’ was about health insurance folks. Nothing to do with the health care.
It was supposed to be just one more insurance plan option among many. Choose the one you want. Pick freely. The best and the cheapest should have emerged as honest, realistic, with sustainable premiums established in an open market place.
It was supposed to be just one more insurance plan option among many. Choose the one you want. Pick freely. The best and the cheapest should have emerged as honest, realistic, with sustainable premiums established in an open market place.
Instead, the USA have been hoodwinked by colluding insurance moghuls in cahoots with the banks and investment lobbies. The same ones that are gouging patients with illegible disclaimers, limits on coverage, and astronomical premiums long divorced from actuarial tables and legitimate risk assessment. They are all liars. We are the pushovers. And the reason we lap it all up is our elected representatives and mass media rebroadcast the lies ad nauseam.
Our partisan politics are the laughing stock of the rest of the world right now. We have settled for half the service at twice the price (and rising), while voting to continue obscene rewards for those who most successfully divert our savings and taxes into immense capital repositories under narrowly held corporate control.
What's the alternative?
I got sick in Cuba. Really sick, off the beaten track in a tiny rural village. Nothing to do with Cuba. A chronic, pre-existing, aging male's plumbing condition flared up. I got myself to the tiny local clinic. One doctor, two nurses. The doctor called the specialist at the nearest regional hospital. Too busy this afternoon. How about 10:00 AM tomorrow. Saturday. My local doctor’s day off.
Someone picked me up anyway, passed by the doctor’s house to pick her up (her day off remember). In to the hospital. Ultrasound, X-ray, urine lab, rectal prostate exam, and a comprehensive discussion in plain language using the ultrasound and x-rays as props. I was given a legible copy of the specialist's case notes and handed a targeted prescription. Out the door.
Time spent? One hour and fifty seven minutes.
Cost for the ultrasound, X-ray, urine lab, rectal exam, specialist consultation and prescription? $250. The local doctor’s fee? $15 and only because I was a foreigner.
Equivalent cost for a Cuban citizen? They've already paid through income tax deducted at source. Fully covered by the national health care plan. No incidental charges. Typical wait time for a Cuban citizen at this hospital? About an hour more than mine because, as a guest, they insisted I skip to the head of the four or five people in line at each station.
The people in line had one compensatory demand, however.
They wanted to see pictures of my wife. Pictures of my kids. Pictures of the low lying mid-winter arctic sun. They wanted to gasp at the incomprehensible –37C temperature the morning I left home.
And, forget privacy, they felt reassured in our common humanity by eavesdropping on the details of my ailments and cure as I chatted with the specialist within ear-shot. They wrapped it up with a few questions about my impressions of "la doctora Beatrice" and "mi primo Pascal".
My doctor and the specialist respectively.
They wanted to see pictures of my wife. Pictures of my kids. Pictures of the low lying mid-winter arctic sun. They wanted to gasp at the incomprehensible –37C temperature the morning I left home.
And, forget privacy, they felt reassured in our common humanity by eavesdropping on the details of my ailments and cure as I chatted with the specialist within ear-shot. They wrapped it up with a few questions about my impressions of "la doctora Beatrice" and "mi primo Pascal".
My doctor and the specialist respectively.
Seems they are all cousins, or nieces, or aunts, and … well, welcome to Cuba. Or is it Nunavut. Places where life and community are still on a human scale.
I had the decency to wait until I got back to the relative seclusion of my lodgings before getting misty-eyed in amazement, gratitude, relief and, admit it, outright affection for these people.
Were my experience and speedy service unusual? Perhaps, but only compared to other tourists. Not to Cubans. Since I speak Spanish well enough to dispense with an interpreter, I was treated like just one more relative. I suspect that with a language barrier, or had I been stuck in metropolitain Havana, that might have added a few hours to the process.
Who pays?
I didn’t bother claiming the travel insurance. Didn’t bill the Nunavut Health Care Plan either. $250 bucks for all that? Prescription included!
How do they do it?
The Helms-Burton version of Cuban economics spews hate and systematic violence at Cuba for having nationalised the plutocratic power base and thereafter resorted to a two-tiered currency.
Foreigners pay for local services directly to Revenue Cuba in new pesos, which are roughly on a par with the dollar.
Cuban employees receive their salaries in old pesos, worth a lot less. The difference goes directly to the national treasury and pays for superb health care and unlimited education. The rest of the planet calls these “source deductions”. They include deductions for federal income tax, provincial or state income tax, unemployment insurance, health care, pension plan, old age security, union dues, all deducted from our pay cheque ‘at source’, i.e. by our employer, and forwarded to our elected representatives. In Canada this also covers municipalities plowing snow off the highways and runways so the fire trucks, ambulance, and garbage trucks can get through.
Helms-Burton calls this socialism, tyranny, communism, confiscation, castroism, big government and lack of market freedom.
In Cuba, Castro calls it ‘revolution’, an enforced period of transition from Batista-Helms enabled plutocratic exploitation and selfishiency to one of fierce national pride in superb shared services, near complete freedom from debilitating disease, near zero polution and crime, and near 100% literacy. All this is capped by a phenomenal generosity overseas towards millions of less fortunate communities despite the crippling economic impact of Helmsian hate mongering and bullying.
Intimidation, Bullying and Executions
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