What's that about Cuba's doctors again?
By A.M. Mora y Leon | Venezuela News and Views
18.02.05 | A Castroite state-controlled media organ reports that El Barbudo is incensed about Cuba not having enough doctors in Cuba in this news item here. Oh really? It's enough to make me wonder if he's almost as oblivious to economics as El Supremo.
Of course there aren't enough Cuban doctors, Castro! You sent them off to be spies in Venezuela! Cubans have noticed this.
And so have Venezuelans! Daniel researched that Misión Barrio Adentro
program and found quite a bit of evidence of such shenanigans here.
You've got plenty of Cuban doctors, Castro. It's just that when you
send them to another country, you don't have them there to exploit in
Cuba.
The problem with this Misión Barrio Adentro Cuban doctor
program is you've turned them into human chattel to be sent like a cash
crop export to Venezuela to "pay" for all that "free" oil you get from
Chavez. They're commodity chits, your very own Oil-for-Doctors program
oozing in corruption for the 'love' of the barrio children and since
these Cuban doctors now are effectively bushels of corn, you shouldn't
be surprised there are shortages when you put artificially low prices
on them. Corn after all goes for $2.20 a bushel while Havana doctors on
the Castro Exchange trade at 50 cents a day. Not only that, as Miguel points out,
real trained doctors from Venezuela are knocked out of the market
because of these cheap Cuban 'freebies'. In the more economically
serious parts of the world, this is called "dumping."
But never
mind that. Why is it that Cuban doctors are paid less than cab drivers
and hookers in Havana? Doctors in Havana make fifteen dollars a month.
Nurses there make eight bucks a
month. This shows how much Fidel values doctors and nurses, paying them
accordingly. Chavez, by contrast, pays them a princely sum, with this
article here showing that Cuban doctors on Misión Barrio Adentro duty
making about $200 a month
for a three-hour, three-day work week. You get what you pay for. And
when you have a busy spying schedule, three hours a day to be a medical
commodity export will have to do.
Speaking of lowball prices,
does it ever occur to you, Barbudo, that you lose a lot of Cuban
doctors to immigration? Some 500 Cuban doctors even in Caracas have
decided that even the $200 a month doesn't cut it and have made their
way to El Norte, Costa Rica, or any other country that will
take them? People pretty well price themselves for what they are worth
to put themselves to their best use. Economics 101.
But among
doctors, there are many for whom money is not the biggest
consideration. The problem is something far more damning: the inhuman
system you've got there, Barbudo, one no humanitarianly instincted doctor would want to get near. Recently, I researched
the life of Dr. Hilda Molina, an elite surgeon in Havana who trashed
her party card ten years ago and tried to pay a visit to her
grandchildren in Buenos Aires, something you wouldn't allow, because
she was Cuba's 'intellectual property.' (That old commodity thing
again, no?) She didn't want to be a doctor in your communist paradise
because she objected to the inhuman two-tier system of medical care - one for rich Sandalistas,
and the other for ordinary Cubanos. You can guess who gets the better
end of the deal based on whose money was good enough and how any decent
doctor would feel about it. But life is funny. There's something about
those yanquis and their dollars that always puts them on top
of things, even in the heart of your impoverished communist paradise
hellhole that doesn't follow the rules of immoral global capitalism.
Somehow the yanks and euros end up on top over there too. Try basic
economics, you schmuck.
Barbudo,
perhaps if you paid Cuban doctors, let them use their minds, stopped
forcing them into spying, dumped the offensive two-tier health care
system and quit treating them like chattel for El Supremo's political purposes, you might actually have a few doctors in Havana.
But this isn't about providing health care to Cubans. This is about
your own ego and your own effort to propagandize about your regime's
supposed focus on health care. Which by all economic and humanitarian
measures is one of the world's most dismal failures.
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