Friday, November 9, 2007

Notable & Quotable: Cuba is Exporting the Best and Consuming the Worst (As Usual)

"Yes, [my wife] did take pictures [of her recent trip to Cuba], but mostly inside her mom's house as the authorities called her to task when she was filming the streets in Guantánamo and the sad state of disrepair of the houses in the town. But she filmed the road from Guantánamo to Holguín and that road was a disaster. Her stories about life in Cuba are enough to fill a big book of horrors. But here is one of them [that stands out].

One of her relatives works in a hospital in that city, and she injured herself and had sought medical help to see an orthopedician and to have her arm X-rayed. She was told there were no specialists to look at her problem and she was told to wait for 4 months for an appointment to see the doctor. Meanwhile her own husband was in Venezuela as a medical doctor earning $9,900 for the Cuban regime while being paid $50 dollars a month. Also my wife was told by the same relative that the Cuban doctors inflate the medical bills presented to the Venezuelan Govt. for the patients they attended with X-rays, electrocardiograms etc. even though they sought help for a minor ailment such as a ingrown nail. The doctors themselves feel very bad about this but they are told they have to fulfill a certain quota of tests and check-ups to pad the bill and enlarge it for Chávez. So while in Cuba the people cannot find a specialist doctor and are being attended by last-year medical students or recent graduates from the School of Medicine, the Venezuelan patients are being treated by all sorts of doctors and specialists sent from Cuba to bill the Clown Chávez for these services. She searched for over 3 days to find toilet paper to purchase with dollars at a shopping! Finally, after 3 days she went to another city and found 4 small rolls for 1.80 CUC the quality of which, according to her, was not even near the worst paper we find here. All of this of course at a price so far out of reach for the average Cuban to make it impossible for them to buy it. She found the situation so bad she was ready to leave after only 5 days into her visit. Naturally, if one was to place this comment on the Cuban Triangle, for example, the likes of commenters like Leftside would say that all of these are lies and made-up stories.
Agustín Fariñas, comment on "Fred Thompson" thread, RCAB, November 9, 2007

Around the time that beef became unavailable in Cuba and its unauthorized possession a criminal offense, a friend related to me that supermarkets in Spain were stocked with imported Cuban beef, which sold at a lower price than did the local product. The Cuban beef, he reported, was of excellent quality and much preferred by Spaniards of limited means who could not otherwise afford beef. This was in the 1960s when Spain was on the road to becoming a developed country and Cuba had embraced underdevelopment as its future. My friend never ceased to be astonishment at the fact that he re-discovered Cuban beef in Spain. He was also reintroduced to Cuban coffee, guava paste and other foodstuffs which had long ago disappeared from the ration card or been offered sporadically and in miniscule amounts which reminded one of the taste but could not satisfy the craving for them.

In the late 1970s, when eggs, coincidentally, no doubt, suddenly became available "por la libre" for the first time in 20 years and the last time since, Cuba was able to corner the international blood plasma market. This was accomplished by harvesting its slaves, who were expected to donate blood in solidarity with their internationalist brethren who were bleeding for the Revolution in Angola and everywhere else in the Third World. Except that the blood that Cubans donated was sold on the international plasma market, where Cuba became the "superpower." It was better to donate a pint of blood than a pound of flesh. For prisoners there was not even a choice; the country's most underfed and least healthy population were the "front line" in this campaign, pumped for hundreds of thousands of pints every week. The advent of AIDS killed this market, although by quaranteening patients with HIV the regime attempted, unsuccessfully, to retain its hold on it.

It was then that it occurred to the Castroites that they didn't have to harvest the blood drop by drop but could rent its surfeit of doctors to the Third World, thereby putting a resource to use that realized no profit in Cuba while at the same time representing itself to the world as philanthropic and humanitarian. The Castro regime had to conceal its participation in the plasma business; but there was no need to hide the Cuban doctors. After all, the Revolution had made them them doctors, right? Who would dare suggest that it could possibly be exploiting them? And, to tell the truth, most newly-minted doctors were anxious to get the hell out of Cuba since they figured that their lives could not possibly get worse anywhere else. This also afforded them with the possibility of travelling and even of escape (not as great as they had imagined). The pittance they were given as allowances they could use to buy items abroad that were not available at home at any prize — simple things, like an electric razor or a thermos.

As Agustín points out, it is no longer the "surfeit" of doctors which is being exported to Venezuela and elswewhere by Cuba. What happened to buses a long time ago in Cuba is now happening to its medical personnel: they are being salvaged for pieces. Hospitals in Cuba, such as they are, are literally being disbanded and the heads of departments and other specialists shipped abroad on "internationalist missions" while the desperate needs of the populace are ignored so that the Smith Brothers of tyranny can attend to the health of their Venezuelan patron's own slaves — to the great consternation, we may add, of Venezuela's doctors, who have been displaced by socialized medicine and their professional careers effectively ended. This is not just a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Paul is as much a casualty of the "largesse" imposed on him as Peter is of the misery.

9 comments:

Fantomas said...

Distinguido Manuel left side commenter del triangulo es un inepto, un burro , o un trabajador de la oficina de Ramiro Valdez

no busques mas na ahi

"a kinder and gentler f"
nov,9, 2007

Sharpshooter said...

Fantomas,
he is neither an inept, nor I suspect an employee of the Interior Ministry. He is one of the typical "california leftist warrior" that can't find anything good about his own country and praises everything or excuses every abuse perpetrated on the Cuban people by saying that is the US fault that the regime has to crack down on the "dissident mercenaries" to protect itself from its enemies. All of his comments are in that vein. The Soviets during their heyday had a good name for them: "useful idiots" and the list is long, from former NY Times reporters during the 1930's to countless "useful" writers from the european intelligentsia such as Arthur Koeppler, Andres Gide, and many others. Leftside would learn a great deal if he was forced to spent 2 years in Cuba living as a regular Cuban. But he knows better. He praises "the socialist" regime established in Cuba but he himself will never live under it. His loas and praises for the Cuban regime are from afar. Well fed, well dressed and able to spouse his leftist views on any blog he chooses with complete freedom. There is an entry in the Webster's dictionary for such behavior under the letter H: Hipocrisy.

Anonymous said...

Fantomas, Agustin....
I have the cure for those idiots.
Exchange them for one of my friends in Cuba. I mean, to live there permanently, wihout any hopes, as my friends in Cuba lead their lives. No exit from the island would be allowed, unless they try their luck in a raft. I guarantee you than in less than a week you will have them crying at the US Interest Section in Havana saying that I took their American passports away when I sent them to live in Cuba!

Vana said...

Agustin:

You are so right, it's very easy to be a leftist when you are well fed, and living a comfortable life in the USA, two years in Cuba would serve them well, they would soon be changing their point of view, and running for their lives.

Vana said...

Manuel:

I read on Google today that four crates of Cuban bananas washed ashore somewhere in Denmark, imagine that! the people probably don't have any bananas to eat, but surely they have them to import out of the Island, this has gone too far already, the castro's get richer and the people suffer, what kind of person are you when you don't give the best to your own people, not human that's for sure

Manuel A.Tellechea said...

Vana:

When someone tells me that pre-Castro Cuba was a "banana republic," I always counter that at least then the people had something to eat. This incident illustrates that point all too well.

Manuel A.Tellechea said...

Agustín:

I have wrangled with the odious leftside in the past and can tell you that you are absolutely right about him.

Here's an old exchange:

"A proud socialist from Chicago who sees hope in the social-economic experiments of our Southern neighbors." — leftside's description of himself

Hope for what? The enslavement of humanity? Haven't you Communists tried that already? Was the murder of more than 1 billion human beings just a dry run? Are you going to "do it right" next time and murder 2 billion? Or 3 billion?

Let me define a slave for you, distinguished dj, urban planner and universal joke of the blogosphere: a slave is someone who is compelled to work for another and receives in exchange the bare sustenance that will allow him to work for one more day to his master's benefit. This is an exact description of the living conditions of the Cuban doctors in Venezuela. The fruits of their labor were paid to Fidel Castro, who, although he has foisted Marxism on Cuba, practices personal capitalism himself, which has allowed him to amass a $900 fortune based upon just such enslavement of his countrymen.

And you? What are you, leftside? A parasite upon such a parasite. You do not commit Castro's crimes, but you condone and cheer them; but although he is the actor and you are merely the reactor, both of you are on the same moral plane. He is the greater menace but I think that you are even more contemptible than him because you are the dog that laps up the blood. But you are much worse: because you are not a dog. Dogs are governed by their instincts, but you have turned your back on everything that defines and elevates humanity above the beasts, who are at least God's creatures. You are a conscious agent and willing instrument of evil. Nothing can be more contemptible.


And the continuation:


Leftside:

Is that the best you can do? To call me an "Asshole?" That is the concern of your beshitted idol, not me.

You don't really have any empathy for the Cuban people; for you they are merely pawns in a game of international politics that ceased to be played when your beloved USSR imploded. Didn't you defend that regime as cravenly as you now defend Castro's dictatorship? Hasn't every Stalinist depended on you for a kind word or thousands of kind words in the span of your miserable existence as an apologist for the inexcusable?

In fact, you are not only indifferent to the suffering of Cubans, you regard them as inhuman and unworthy of enjoying the freedoms that you enjoy here and would never forfeit, not even to enjoy the spectacle of seeing Cubans degraded on a daily basis while you live in relative comfort in your socialist paradise. Why must your paradise be another man's hell?

The Cuban doctors "volunteered" because Cubans will do anything (and have) to escape Castro's island prison. It is most assuredly better to be a Castro slave in Venezuela or any other country than in Cuba, because then at least you have the possibility of escaping to freedom without having to forfeit your life in the bargain.

As for Castro's personal wealth made at the expense of the Cuban people, I am confident that Forbes can tell a capitalist from a communist, even if you can't. Castro has never lived an ascetic life, nor, God forbid, shared the misery which he has inflicted on his countrymen. He owns the world's biggest plantation and has more slaves than did all the slavemasters of the Confederacy. If you were really a socialist like Marx, you would despise him as a plutocrat. But, of course, you are nothing but a shameless deluded sadist who masks his bloodlust in a superannuated ideology.

Vana said...

Manuel:

You slapped leftside across the face, if that does not shake him to the core, and make him change his point of view, I don't know what will.

Sharpshooter said...

Vana,
and those were Leftside virtues, Manuel so prefectlty described, imagine if he got around to his faults!
You can tell by his words, Manuel has a great afection for this guy! Well you can say that we share the same feeling of disgust I have for that odious excuse for a human being. (LOL)
Great virtual ass whipping you gave that despicable "california cafe guerrilla", Manuel!