Healthcare Workers to Tour Cuba

When Michael Moore directed the documentary SiCKO (Dog Eat Dog Films, 2007), he portrayed Cuba's public health system as an international elite that offers residents free, famously effective, cradle-to-grave medical care that rivals anything offered in the United States and Canada. Some observers challenge any glowing appraisals offered by Moore and others as being at least partially the products of a despotic propaganda machine whose gears are cranked by the Castro dictatorship. The truth about our "forbidden" neighbor's famous health system is one that few Americans have witnessed firsthand since the 1963 U.S. embargo, but this fall, a commercial touring company will take a group of healthcare practitioners on a face-to-face tour of the island's healthcare organizations and facilities.

Cuba Education Tours, of Vancouver, British Columbia, announced on June 23 that it will take a "delegation" of healthcare providers to Havana from October 11 through 18, 2008, and that positions in the tour are still open. According the touring company, "the exploratory program allows participants to travel to Cuba legally under current U.S. regulations." It notes that the program is "legal and licensable for professionals engaged in full-time work related to this tour's theme," and that "most delegates will treat this tour as a tax-deductible, professional-development, fact-finding mission. Certificates of completion are issued, and in some cases qualify for CME and CEU credits." During a phone call with The O&P EDGE, a representative of the company confirmed that orthotists, prosthetists, and others working and studying in the profession, as well as their spouses and partners, are welcome to come.

Cuba Education Tours' website lists a packed touring schedule. Visits to a hospital, a local clinic, museums, and music shows will be interspersed with activities including discussions with officials of the Cuban ministry of health, an introduction to members of the Cuban Association for the Physically Disabled (ACLIFIM), a visit to the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), a meeting at the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), and a visit to a facility for youth with disabilities.

The website also lists a set of visitors' "most common questions" and the tour company's answers. They include:

Participants will stay at the five-star Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana and will travel in an air-conditioned "luxury coach" (a bus) from site to site. And while the website promises "five-star treatment round-the-clock... for worry-free travel abroad," Cuba is still considered a Third World nation. The touring company advises travelers to bring their own toilet paper, tampons, and condoms, and to drink only bottled water. They also advise making room in luggage to carry to local healthcare groups some badly needed donations--medical supplies, shorts, and shoes.

The cost for the tour is $2,192 in either U.S. or Canadian dollars, which excludes airfare and most meals.

Cuba has two types of health care systems just like it has two types of stores and two types of hotels and two types of beaches:

1. Those that are of good quality and reserved for the Communist Party elite and for foreigners with Dollars. (Lately the stores, called Diplo-Tiendas or "Diplo(mat)-Stores", have been opened to Cubans with Dollars sent by relatives in the U.S. The family composed solely of loyal Communists that stayed in Cuba without relatives in the U.S. are S.O.L. and experience economic apartheid in their own country.)

2. Those that the average Cuban citizen is chased out of as if he were a flea-bitten dog.

My mother and my sister got stuck in Communist Cuba for 27 years because my grandfather was a political prisoner. When they came to the U.S., they had never had a physical exam work up, my mother had never had a mammogram and they both needed extensive dental work.

When my sister was in Cuba and would contract a candida yeast infection, the medical advice she would get would be to write to a relative in the U.S. and ask them to send Fleischmann's Yeast to use as a douche. Since the mail in Cuba takes weeks, she would suffer with the candida for weeks until she got the Fleischmann's Yeast in the mail.........along with a couple of courses of Monistat cream that I would throw in with the advice to try the Monistat first.

When I was a U.S. Navy medical officer in Guantanamo in the 1980's, we treated one of the Cuban workers that Castro allowed to work on the Base (Castro would take their U.S. Dollar paychecks and exchange them for Pesos) that had suffered a lower leg open fracture. We took him to surgery to debride the wound and left the leg splinted but uncasted as you cannot put a cast on a contaminated open wound. The next day, we returned him to the Cuban side.

Months later, another Cuban worker told me what happened to him in the Cuban health-care system. He went to a clinic where the Communist-trained "doctor" told him that "the Americans did not know what they were doing" and put his leg in a cast. As time passed, the leg hurt more and more and he was told by the Communist-trained "doctor" that everything was fine.

When the casted leg began to stink and they finally took the cast off, the leg was an infected mess. He almost lost his leg and his life.

That is how a healthy, physically active man with no significant vices fares and with a straight forward problem fares in the Cuban health-care system.

If you took the social pathology found in America's inner cities and combined it with Cuba's health-care system, the life expectancy in such a community would take a serious nose dive.

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