As I noted in my last post, Castro's alleged improvements in Cuban health care are often used as a counterpoint to his repressive policies. Maybe he repressed political dissent, apologists claim, but at least he improved health care. For example, CNN urges its reporters to "[p]ease note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care . . . in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech."
In addition to the more obvious objections to this line of argument, it's also essential to recognize that political repression is bad for health. As I discussed in this post, the Cuban communist government executed some 100,000 political prisoners and imprisoned some 350,000 others in brutal labor camps during the the 1960s alone. This in a population of just 6.3 million as of 1960. Obviously, getting executed is bad for your health. Due to the milder climate, Cuban forced labor camps probably have better health standards than Soviet Gulags. Nonetheless, even a tropical Gulag isn't too good for the health of the inmates. A substantial number of the labor camp inmates likely either died before their sentences were up or had their lifespan substantially reduced as a result of privation they endured.
Calculating the odds, this implies that the average Cuban at the start of Castro's regime had a roughly 1.5% chance of being executed by the regime and a 5.6% chance of being incarcerated in a labor camp. In reality, the risks were probably higher than that for those who stayed in Cuba, since the 6.3 million population figure includes several hundred thousand Cubans successfully fled the country in the early years of the regime (the US alone admitted some 750,000 Cuban refugees between 1960 and 1976).
Even if Castro's government really did improve health care substantially for those Cubans who were fortunate enough to avoid being executed or incarcerated in labor camps, the improvement would have to be pretty enormous to outweigh the negative health effects of the regime's repressive policies. How much of an in improvement in health care would be enough for you to be willing to take a 1.5% chance of being executed and a 5.6% chance of being sent to a brutal labor camp for at least several years?
UPDATE: I have corrected a minor calculation error in my estimate of the odds of being sentenced to a forced labor camp in 1960s Cuba. The correct figure is 5.6%, not 4.8%.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Interesting Interview with Cuban Dissident Armando Valladares:
- Are Cubans Satisfied With their Government?
- The Impact of Castro's Repression on Cuban Health:
- Castro's Dictatorship and Cuban Health Care:
100k murdered in 60'!
That guy is must be B-A-D.
But, wait a minute. Is there any proof, beside of Miami Herald' media whores recycling CIA news for $80k a year in extra pocket money?
That murder figure is akin to those millions of birds killed by wind mills competing with Enron.
Perhaps, Ilya, you should change to "untold numbers"?
Well, the truth is, the Revolution consisted of taking away wine glasses and beer mugs from dead drunken officials on the New Year morning.
It was one of the less bloody Revolutions in human history.
Only a few guilty apparatchicks were executed. And Fidel was a guest at the White House, no less. Until he put hands on capitalist property.
As to those happy Cubans in USA? In Union City, NJ, they live 14 per apartment, make $5,25/h (rent $1400/month) and don't have ANY insurance at all.
But they have Bob Menendez, an apparatchick from a single political party land other then Cuba. And, while Fidel never had a secret Swiss bank account, his critic Menendez managed to get millions from political "contibutions", and from charities leasing his house at taxpayer's expense.
If you present the statistics that way, you are assuming that the Castro regime executed and imprisoned people completely at random. That's not likely to have been the case.
Wouldn't this be evidence of how crappy Cuba is? I mean, if they prefer living like this here?
It was not completely random. But neither did you actually have to be guilty of any substantial opposition activity to get executed. But it is true that the risk was probably less than 1.5% for some and greater for others. Of course any improvements in health care were not randomly distributed either.
- Joseph Stalin
Hey Molly, are we there, yet?
On the other hand, Iyla, I think the CNS story got some of its numbers wrong. The Wiki entry for human rights in Cuba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba (never an authoritative source, but a usually good for a rough estimate) gives a variety of numbers, from a low of about 2,000 (1959 to 1970) to a high of 73,000. The article says, "The Black Book of Communism claims an estimate of 15,000-17,000 people who were executed."
Any mistake Iyla might have made with his numbers is not relevant to his point. On the other hand, there seem to be no lack of the morally vacuous ready to excuse the regime. I'm glad to be graced by the presence of those capable of judging the dead as "guilty apparatchicks". Nothing like omnipotence when it comes to to these things. Think of how we could speed up the justice system with a few more like minded people in charge.
They don't play that even in Cuba. Do they?
ExecutionEuthanasia is a cost effective and compassionate form of health care.Assuming this is not a rhetorical question: well, an improvement over what? I happen to adore the health care that is available in the U.S.. Sure, I've had my share (or more than my share?) of mediocre or downright idiotic doctors, but, on the whole, I'm still alive and relatively healthy. I wouldn't trade the few thousand it would cost for me to get surgery to correct my two lingering health problems for freedom, let alone a chance of execution.
Better my time and money than my freedom and a threat to my life. Hell would freeze over before I would subject my family to a 1.5% chance of execution. What are the chances of someone in your immediate family being executed or sent to forced labour camps in Cuba?
No doctrinaire rhetoric there, huh?
Hell yeah. Just witness the many comments on this site from those who support Bush, Dick, and the neocons!
Given the choice I would rather live in Castro's Cuba than under the regime that was installed in Guatamala by the CIA or the ones we supported in El Salvador or Nicaragua throughout most of the Soviet era.
If we had treated Cuba like the rest of the Soviet Bloc, instead of pandering to Cuban exiles in Florida, Castro would have been gone with the Soviet Union. Instead our policies towards Cuba have been counterproductive.
When Castro came to power in Cuba, the country was the most economically advanced and fastest developing in the region. Batista was justly loathed as a dictator but under him the Cuban people were far freer and far fewer were killed, tortured, or imprisoned than is the case with Castro. I cannot think of a case in the Americas where a regime change caused such a dramatic and permanent lowering in the living standards and political freedoms of a nation. Peron's destruction of the Argentine economy comes close but is still no match.
Can J. F. Thomas give me an example. I'm also interested in his evidence for the counter-factual that the Castro regime would have withered away if US policies towards Cuba had been different.
Seriously? Or am I misreading your post?
Hell yeah. Just witness the many comments on this site from those who support Bush, Dick, and the neocons!
Certainly brave of you to speak against our leaders in this "brutal regime".
If we are to believe the 100,000 in the sixities number, that would mean the Cuban government executed what amounted to 25 political prisoners every single day for eleven years.
I know there are only ten years in the sixities, but I was counting 1959, the first year of the new government, as well.
Thanks anonthu. But surely you'd agree that a regime can still be brutal, yet, still have not committed an act of brutality against you personally. Of course you do. And while I appreciate the compliment, I'm not as brave as I'd like to be. If I was, I'd say what I REALLY think.
Additionally, Ilya, I urge you to compare apples to apples. If you are going to include incarceration and execution rates as part of "health care" statistics for Cuba, then you have to do the same for the U.S.
The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Ilya says you had a 5.6% chance of being incarerated "at the start of Castro's regime" - 40 years ago!
In contrast, if you are an African American male in his twenties, you have a 10% chance of being incarcerated in the U.S. - today!
The U.S. has worse health care outcomes than Cuba on every objective measure(longevity, infant mortality, etc.).
If you add in the fact that, today, we incarcerate more of our population than Cuba does, then by Ilya's reasoning, the U.S. fares even worse in comparison with Cuba.
Overall, my point is that it's totally irrelevant to include incarceration and execution rates in a "health care" statistic. But if you insist on using that methodology, you should apply it to all countries, as they incarcerate people today - not 40 years ago.
What's holding you back? Are federal agents at the door?
Unless your speech involves plotting an actual crime (as to distinguish from the types of "think-crimes" for which Castro's opponents were imprisoned), I'll go out on a limb here and tell you that you won't be imprisoned for it.
I'm speaking of "tyranny" here on a sliding scale (all the way from taxation to punishment of "political crimes"), in the spirit of Professor de la Paz:
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
The collapse of all of the Soviet Union's client states in Eastern Europe in 1989 followed by the collapse of the USSR itself two and a half years later. Heck, even the economic reforms (if not followed by any meaningful political freedom) in China demonstrates that completely isolating a regime is the wrong way to get it to change.
When Castro came to power in Cuba, the country was the most economically advanced and fastest developing in the region.
While you may think that a Kleptocracy is a nice way to run a society, one where the Mafia (not figuratively or even behind the scenes but literally) controls the reins of power and is operating freely, I hardly consider that the basis of a "economically advanced" society. By the time of the revolution, Meyer Lansky practically ran the country.
Having seen a significant number of recent Chinese immigrants with HPV-related diseases, I am inclined to doubt the accuracy of this old (1960's) claim. In fact, I doubted its accuracy then. I doubt the accuracy of any vital statistics from closed societies.
http://www.popline.org/docs/0484/004644.html
Google Mao tse tung and "venereal disease"
It's astonishing to me that people who would scream "liar" if Bush said that it was sunny outside will take at face value statements made by an authoritarian government with no independent press or other check on its credibility.
Certainly brave of you to speak against our leaders in this "brutal regime".
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Yep, imagine trying that in Venezuela.
And it's astonishing to me that someone would make a bald assertion like Mr. Nieporent did without checking his facts. In contrast to his assertion, many independent press organizations and NGOs have concluded that health care outcomes are better in Cuba than in the U.S.:
CNN, citing NGO report
OECD report
Businessweek, citing Commonwealth fund report
NY Times, citing C.I.A. World Factbook
etc.
I can't say whether you're misreading it, but you certainly misrepresented it. Out of context it appears I think Castro's faults and virtues were evenly balanced, when my point was the opposite. I was responding to tvk, who wrote:
To which I replied,
But of course throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a past time that unites ideologues of every stripe.
Link? Source? Any basis at all for this statement other than your imagination?
No problem.
Hmm... I agree that there are problems with using longevity and infant mortality as measures of a nation's health care outcomes.
But (1) those are the only data we have. I'd love to see a study using other measures.
and (2) I disagree that "cure rate after medical intervention" is a better measure of a "health care system." This measure ignores two key factors: the effectiveness of preventative medicine within the health care system, and the availability of access to health care "interventions."
Hmmm, I always wondered why I thought rum and Diet Coke was the nectar of the gods...;-)
No but to the extent that Cuba is isolated, the regime has been able to use that isolation to blame its problems (even when they are they are of its own creation) on "Yankee imperialism" and the embargo. It has enabled Castro to have a convenient scapegoat.
JFT, certainly Castro uses the embargo as a scapegoat, but I think history demonstrates pretty clearly that politicians do not need justification to create scapegoats. If real grievances are nonexistent, imaginary ones will do just as well.
I think the difference between a 5.6% chance of being imprisoned as a political prisoner in a labor camp is significantly different from any specific chance of being imprisoned as a drug pusher, violent criminal, or other felon in a normal prison.
As for Mr. Armando Lago's statistics, though, I would advise people remain rather cautious. While I am extremely doubtful of the oft-stated 7,000-12,000 deaths related to the Castro regime, given a 1998 Associated Press report citing up to five thousand executions alone, Lago's statistics assume more than 80,000 disappearances at sea, and that's over the last few decades. Especially before his work can be heavily reviewed, there are better sources.
To all of those citing other Latin American dictatorships for the proposition that "Castro isn't so bad, look at the neighbors," why don't you take a look in the mirror -- you only attack those dictatorships, and never defend them by saying "they're not so bad, look at Cuba." In particular, no leftist ever defended the struggling El Salvaroran democracy by comparing it to Cuba.
The assertions that Cuba's health care is "better than the U.S." are laughable. Cuba's wealth is little greater than Haiti's. Do you really think that such a poor country has great health care? If you do, I've got a lot more I can sell to you... And by the way, even taking Cuban health statistics as true, it's outcomes are similar to those of Mexico, when Cuba 50 years ago had better outcomes than Mexico.
Some years ago a nutritionist suggested that prisoners of the Japanese working on the railroad had the diet provided at the time to thank for their longevity.
Thankfully, Weary Dunlop, an Australian doctor who treated the prisoners during their captivity, was alive to place the "nutrional" diet in a little perspective.