The entire narrative of free health care in Cuba is a myth and a fraud. First of all, the population was nutritionally deprived in a way that beggars description - I’m going back to the early 1980s when they were still a satellite of the USSR. Most people went to bed hungry. I’m talking.about educated, employed, white collar people. Food was rationed so that a family of four had one chicken a week. That was the protein. There were no fresh vegetables. Ever. Even citrus fruit, which grows there, was a rarity. Fish was hard to come by. Shrimp an unheard of luxury. The diet was mainly rice, potatoes, yuca and beans with some cardboard-like bread.
Then, to get medical care, you, or someone in your family would have to donate blood - not for you - the Cuban govt was in the blood bank business and sold blood on the world market.
And even as a satellite of the.USSR, there were no sheets or towels in the hospitals. And also NO MEDICINE. I had friends who were teachers.who were having a baby, and the pregnant wife wept with gratitude when I brought her vitamins. Again, in the 1980s. It got worse every year.
I knew scores of doctors who did not have access to even simple over the counter type medicine like aspirin, antacids, inhalers, antihistimines. Even for themselves.
The doctors were not rigorously educated and trained the way they are in normal countries, where you have to be smart to get into med school. It’s not even imaginable who they had as doctors - think of how the standards have been lowered for our police forces, and you’ll have an idea.
Of you saw the number of crippled and deformed people there - it’s like an Ingmar Bergman movie set in the middle ages....
Fidel bringing in a Spanish doctor when he just about croaked a few years ago says it all about the “wonderful” Cuban health system.