By: Humberto Capiro

Humberto Capiro — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 19:18:14 +0000

WIKILEAK DOCUMENT : Viewing cable 08HAVANA103, CUBAN HEALTHCARE: “AQUI NADA ES FACIL”- In one Cuban hospital, patients had to bring their own light bulbs. In another, the staff used “a primitive manual vacuum” on a woman who had miscarried. In others, Cuban patients pay bribes to obtain better treatment. Those and other observations by an unidentified nurse assigned to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana were included in a dispatch sent by the mission in January 2008 and made public this month by WikiLeaks. Titled “Cuban healthcare: Aquí Nada es Facil” — Nothing here is easy — the cable offers a withering assessment by the nurse, officially a Foreign Service Health Practitioner, or FSHP, who already had lived in Cuba for 2 ½ years.

By: Cubaverdad

Cubaverdad — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 12:17:27 +0000

One small thing that people forget: Cuban doctors are exploited by the regime and rented out for up to 140,000 dollars a year while they receive a pittance.
In the mean time all but the tourist and elite hospitals in the apartheid system are well stocked. they seem to be impervious to the “blockade” the regime uses as false excuse to explain why the health care for the Cuban people is so bad.
In reality: the Castro regime’s mismanagement of the economy has ensured that there are nu funds to maintain the health service for the people. At least one in three “family doctors” stations was closed. Most clinics and hospitals lack even the basics (sheets, medicines, ..) and are understaffed as over half of Cuba’s doctors (especially specialists) are rented out abroad. They are the “salves in white” of the Castro regime. denied the right to freely travel or emigrate. Sent abroad while their families are withheld in Cuba as “hostages” for their return.
As far as the quality of Cuban doctors go: that has decreased tremendously. Cuba trained doctors failed certification exams in droves in Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, … Costa Rica calculated that the Cuban curriculum didn’t arrive at 80% of the courses it considers a minimum for a doctors’ education.
Your “health tourists” will be treated in those parts of hospitals that have everything while in another wing of the same Cuban hospital a Cuban child may be lacking the basics. While “nip and tuck” operations will go ahead in the tourist part of the medical apartheid life saving operations are cancelled in the Cuban part.
I would ask everyone to think twice before becoming part of this abusive system.

Comments on: How Cuba’s Health Care Sector Aims to Gain a Greater Foothold

By: Humberto Capiro

By: Cubaverdad