Castro’s a robot at this point, right?
The 60s had too many hippies.
Pretty sure they’re looking to the Roaring Twenties.
Castro compared to Stalin, Hitler…wtf
Hey, while we’re tossing names into the hat, Bush Jr… and Americans elected him, so they can all go into the hat imho
lol… unless you happened to be one of the cubans in the hospitals where you die of infections from sleeping on unwashed sheets. Those didn’t make it into Michael Moore’s movie though.
That totally counteracts all the statistical information available. Good job!
I imagine conditions in nearby Jamaica and Haiti aren’t much better.
Despite a 50-year trade embargo by the United States and a post-Soviet collapse in international support, the impoverished nation has developed a world-class health care system. Average life expectancy is 77.5 years, compared to 78.1 years in the United States, and infant and child mortality rates match or beat our own. There’s one doctor for every 170 people, more than twice the per-capita U.S. average.[…]
You’re welcome.
I wanted some information on that The Real Cuba site, and when I googled it, this came up in the right column:
Also try
kill castro
babalu
newsmax
babalu blog
veneconomy
I didn’t even know Google had that function!
Be very wary when using statistics produced by a tyrannical communist regime. remember the soviets used to put out statistics that painted a much brighter picture of what things were like behind the iron curtain than they really were.
Some things to consider when citing the stats like infant mortality rate…
According to defectors who were doctors, physicians in cuba are forced to lie about stats when they report them, such as saying that a child was older than one year when they were actually younger when they died, specifically to deflate their infant mortality rate. Additionally, look at the abortion rate in cuba. It’s the highest in the western hemisphere, by far. Around four times that of the US. Aborting a fetus that has medical problems will lower your infant mortality rate, but isn’t indicative of a high quality medical system.
Things really suck in cuba. Really really bad. That’s why people are willing to risk their lives to try and escape on crappy handmade boats.
Abortion rate:
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=GenderStat&f=inID%3A12
Cuba 24.8
United States of America 20.8
Sweden 20.2
Estonia 33.3
It’s a bit different with “percentage of pregnancies”:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/wrjp333pd2.html
Cuba 34.1
United States of America 22.6
Sweden 25.4
Estonia 38.7
And under-five mortality rate:
Cuba 6.5
United States of America 7.8
Sweden 4.0
Estonia 9.8
These stats appear to be different than those numbers, with cuba having a rate of 2.66 compared to the rate in the US of 0.69.
On my phone now, so it’s hard to see where the discrepancy is coming from.
again, I tend to view stats gathered through a communist regime to be somewhat sketchy, based upon how the soviets routinely lied to make things appear much better than they were
EDIT: Sorry, removed the link for legal reasons pointed out by Lynch.
I found it through google by typing Cuban Abortion Rate so you can find it yourself.
• You may provide a hypertext link to this Web site on another Web site, provided that
a. the link is a text-only link clearly marked “Guttmacher Institute,”
b. the link “points” to the URL “http://www.guttmacher.org” and not to other pages within the Web site,
c. the appearance, position and other aspects of the link are not such as to damage or dilute the goodwill associated with the Guttmacher Institute’s name and trademarks,
d. the appearance, position and other aspects of the link do not create the false appearance that an entity other than the Guttmacher Institute is associated with or sponsored by the Guttmacher Institute, and
e. the link, when activated by a user, displays this Web site full-screen and not within a “frame” on the linked Web site.
Am I smelling lawyers?
The relatively high rate in Cuba (78 per 1,000) includes menstrual regulation, an early abortion procedure carried out without pregnancy testing, as well as termination of known pregnancies. In 1996, 60% of the procedures were menstrual regulations.
Menstrual regulation is a very early procedure, and as such is not selective based on potential health issues.
It’s also something that really isn’t very standard, and again, is a statistic being put out by the Cuban government which is pretty heavy on the propaganda side of things.
Like I said, and this is certainly based upon my own opinion and bias to be sure, I view statistics provided under the oppressive regulation of Cuban’s current regime with an inherent dose of skepticism.
The stories told by defectors from Cuba never seem to mesh with what Cuba presents as reality, and really this isn’t surprising at all. The mere notion of a defector somewhat implies that there are some problems with the regime.
Some links to Cuban doctors who have defected.
Things in Cuba are very similar to how they were in the Soviet Union. For the elite, you get very good treatment. This section of their society is presented to the outside world, as an example of how great things are under their system of government. But the average Cuban doesn’t get access to that. They are faced with huge shortages of simple things that we take for granted… things like asprin. But because the government controls so much of daily life, it’s much harder to see into that part of the system, other than through the words of defectors.
Again:
The relatively high rate in Cuba (78 per 1,000) includes menstrual regulation, an early abortion procedure carried out without pregnancy testing, as well as termination of known pregnancies. In 1996, 60% of the procedures were menstrual regulations.
Look, if you don’t think any data out of Cuba is valid, ok, I don’t agree, but in that case you can’t cite the study on Guttmacher’s website which quite clearly states “For all but seven of these 59 countries, we present government abortion statistics.”
Menstrual regulation is offered to all women who missed their period by two weeks. If you talk to women, I’m sure you will find that most of them have missed their periods at some point. Apart from that procedure, there’s simply no reason to think that Cuba has an extreme abortion rate in comparison to similarly developed countries, and certainly no reason to believe that that would be the reason that Cuba shows a better infant mortality rate than the US.
How come you link to an article about working conditions in Venezuela?
Hey, I don’t think you can find anyone on this forum (maybe except for Janster) who doesn’t think that the best future for Cuba is as a market economy-based democracy, and the repressive government of Cuba certainly has a lot to answer for.
The stories told by defectors from Cuba never seem to mesh with what Cuba presents as reality, and really this isn’t surprising at all. The mere notion of a defector somewhat implies that there are some problems with the regime.
It’s also not surprising because someone who leaves a country isn’t usually leaving it because they have good feelings about it. Defectors are notoriously unreliable sources, which is largely why the US invasion of Iraq was such an intelligence disaster - the case for invasion was built on the testimony of defectors.
Cuba shouldn’t be compared to the US. It isn’t remotely the same kind of country. It should be compared to its neighbours, like Haiti and Jamaica. It’s not doing too badly relative to these countries, considering the double whammy of the devastating impact of US sanctions and the collapse of an economy built on generous Soviet hand-outs. Imagine that scenario and a greedy, pocket-filling regime in control, like the ones propped up by the US in Haiti.
Well, the article talks about how Cuba treats their doctors, and how they are defecting as a result.
There are additional stories of defectors, and some of the things they have said about the cuban medical system.
This paper presents some of the discrepencies between the media’s portrayal of Cuba’s medical system, and the system as experienced by Cubans themselves.
http://www.miscelaneasdecuba.net/media/pdf/Article-Hirschfeld-Press.pdf
This paper appears to be less biased than many sources on either side, and takes an academic view of the problem. However, she also recognizes and points out that any research in this area is hard to conduct, due to criminalization of criticism of the Cuban government.
Well, the fact that a country has defectors at all is kind of indicative of a horrific regime being in power. In most countries, if you want to leave you just leave.