Health Care Cuban Style

Claudia Cadelo is the name of a courageous young female blogger in Cuba. She is one of the very few Cubans who dare to speak out against a totalitarian society in which they themselves are born captive. She blogs knowing that she can be arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison at any moment, day or night. Claudia Cadelo follows the example of her mentor, Yoani Sanchez, who decided two years ago to blog in Cuba openly as a free person does in a free country. Claudia emulates Yoani’s blogging style of beautifully written short posts (two to four paragraphs) accompanied by one photograph. There are hundreds of Cuban dissidents in prison with long sentences for speaking much less than Yoani or Claudia. The photo below is from Claudia’s most recent post.

To Michael Moore and the millions of simple minded liberal Americans who believe that Cuba has a “single payer” health care system worth emulating, this blog post is for you.

“I have nothing to say to people that use their freedom of expression, their civil rights, their economic freedoms and their political freedoms to defend this totalitarian system. I don’t believe that any system is perfect, but what I am sure of is that this system is not the right one: a better society cannot be constructed if the basis of it is oppression, fear, militarism, the absence of civil rights and the supreme unlimited power in the hands of only two or three people; and we can add to that that the social ills, the corruption and the poverty which are also a part of the status quo, which remains.”   Claudia Cadelo

Life is sacred in Cuba? -  By Claudia Cadelo

These words of Arlín Rodríguez, from the TV talk show The Roundtable on March 17, thundered in my ears for half an hour. A few days ago I had access to three hundred photos of the autopsies of those who died at the psychiatric hospital in Havana and I cannot imagine how that phrase came out of the mouth of a journalist.

When I opened the little folder called “Mazorra” a series of monstrosities hit me in the face and I couldn’t stop looking at the cruel graphic testimony. A friend who is a doctor visited and while he analyzed images I didn’t have the courage to look at, expressions like, “Holy Virgin Mary, Blessed God, What in God’s name is this?” issued from his outraged throat, mixed with obscure pathologies and the names of diseases both treatable and curable.

Enormous livers, tubercular lungs, and wormy intestines are the proof, Señora Arlín, of the sacredness of life in Cuba. Meanwhile The Roundtable throws a fit because the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo has unmasked a crumbling public health system, and they try to cover up the disgrace of a seeing soldiers dragging and beating a group of women dressed in white with flowers in their hands. I ask myself, Gentlemen Journalists, when will they explain to Cubans the reasons why twenty-six mentally incapacitated people died in inhumane conditions during their confinement in Mazorra?

Note: I publish this photo with a completely clear conscience; if they were not shown there would be no proof of the suffering that these people were subjected to. If not for the hard photos that denounced the Nazi Holocaust, the genocide of Pol Pot or the tortures in the prisons of Abu Ghraib, they, too, would not have existed.