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WSJ: How The Castro Regime's Socialized Healthcare Failures Are Fueling Cuba's Pro-Freedom Uprising

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  July 12, 2021 1:15 PM

The Cuban people are defying threats and acts of violence by the island nation's communist regime to demand their freedom.  It's inspirational and deeply courageous, with crackdowns on basic press and assembly freedoms already underway. It has become fashionable in some quarters to demean our flag and national anthem here in America, but among populations suffering under the jackboot of communism, the stars and stripes remain a source of strength and aspiration.  

Some Americans would do well to take note of these scenes -- featuring non-white people, it must be said, for the race obsessives -- and really think hard about the implications:


Some on the Left are framing the spontaneous protests as merely a response to the regime's healthcare failures and various shortages, which the most anti-American zealots are trying to pin on the US trade embargo, which exempts medicine and food.  In reality, as Sen. Marco Rubio and others are pointing out, the true animating drive of this uprising is the regime itself, and its endemic despotism, brutality, corruption and incompetence:  


After an impossibly weak whiff by a State Department official yesterday, the White House released a much better statement today, largely echoing the strong support for the demonstrations voiced by a host of Republicans over the last 24-plus hours.  The current healthcare fiasco in Cuba is an important symptom of the underlying disease: Communism.  But this life-and-death mismanagement is driving much of the pent-up anger manifesting in cities all across Cuba.  Wall Street Journal columnist Mary O'Grady, whose beat is Latin America, explains:

Havana wants the world to believe that Cuban hardship in healthcare is caused by the U.S. embargo. But food and medicine are exempt from the embargo...Cuba’s real problem is that it’s broke. And while all poor countries in the region have struggled to serve the public during Covid-19, only Cuba has made things worse by trying to use the pandemic as a way to earn hard currency for the ruling elite and boost its legitimacy around the world. Shortages of medications for treatable illnesses in Cuba are routine. The contagious mite infestation of the skin known as scabies, for example, can be remedied with antibiotics and topical medicines like permethrin. Yet Cuban public-health officials have been helpless to stop it from spreading across the island...Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. 

It's not just the Cuban regime that "promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse." Propagandists who support Socialized healthcare and constantly seek to portray America's healthcare system -- which developed life-saving COVID vaccines in record time -- as a disaster have praised the Cuban model. From Michael Moore documentaries to New York Times columnists, this line (in addition to unreliable regime literacy statistics) have been parroted by elements of the American Left for years. Back in reality, Cuba's creaky, under-resourced, corruption-plagued healthcare system is getting crushed by the pandemic, and the people are revolting. O'Grady goes on:

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Cuba’s claim that it graduates thousands of qualified doctors and nurses every year is suspect. Yet even if the numbers are reliable, Havana’s practice of human trafficking robs the nation of available medical professionals. The dictatorship claims it sends tens of thousands of healthcare workers around the globe out of altruism. But the medical missions are a money-making operation. Countries pay Havana for the workers in dollars or euros and it gives only a fraction of that income to the in-country Cuban. The rest it pockets. In the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, issued last month, Cuba gets a failing grade...This mistreatment includes confiscating documents and salaries and threatening workers and their families if they try to flee their assignments. The regime’s medical-export survival strategy also creates a shortage of medications. Cuba produces pharmaceutical products but exports them for profit rather than making what is needed available to the population.

Communism and kleptocracy go hand-in-hand, alongside human misery.  Finally, in the spirit of Cuba Libre, I'll leave you with this powerful flashback from last summer's RNC: