We, the undersigned, all medical doctors recently exiled from Cuba, are compelled to speak out against the current campaign in the American press to blame the U.S. embargo for the reported decline of the Cuban health care system. The most recent reports being a study by the American Association for World Health and a column in the Washington Post by Mr. Stephen Rosenfeld.
We remain mystified as to why people of ordinarily good will and faith would seek to find fault with the United States for the disastrous situation inside Cuba, while failing to direct the blame squarely where it belongs - at the feet of Fidel Castro, who continues to rule our country with an iron fist after 38 years in power. We hope that with this statement we can in some small way educate American public opinion on the issue of Cuban health care and who and what are to blame for its decline.
We, who have only recently emerged from the belly of the beast, can categorically and authoritatively state that our people's poor health care situation results from a dysfunctional and inhumane economic and political system, exacerbated by the willingness of the regime to divert scarce health resources to meet the needs of the regime's elite and foreign patients who bring hard currency.
Indeed, our collective witness to the mismanagement of resources, the inefficient distribution of medicines, the politicization of our profession, theft, absenteeism, lack of motivation by healthcare workers, blackmarketeering, graft, the rise in health problems such as alcoholism and suicides - all characteristics and by-products of a suffocating state control of Cuban society, not any foreign embargo - would fill a volume one hundred times the size of our American colleagues' recent report.
To our perhaps well-meaning but naïve American medical colleagues who travel to Cuba, we can only say you do not see the real Cuba, only a carefully constructed Potemkin Village used by the Castro regime to propagate its political gospel. It causes us no satisfaction to say that by misinforming the American public as to the causes of our people's travails you share a measure of responsibility with the Castro regime in perpetuating their suffering.
We wish that any one of us could provide tours to foreign visitors of the hospitals Cira Garcia, Frank Pais, CIMEQ, and Hermanos Ameijeiras, in order to point out the medicines and equipment, even the bedsheets and blankets, reserved for regime elites or dollar-bearing foreigners, to the detriment of our people, who must bring their own bedsheets, to say nothing of the availability of medicines.
We would also like to show them the centers of pharmaceutical investigation that produce specialized medicines and vaccines for export - which have absolutely no benefit to the Cuban people but are operated solely to raise hard currency to keep the regime in power. Yes, in some pharmacies our people may find a needed medicine, but they can only be purchased with American dollars, to which the great majority of the Cuban people do not have access. In these stores, the national currency, the Cuban peso, is not welcomed.
It is with great sadness that we say we expect the health of our people to continue to decline, because, as despicable as it may sound, Fidel Castro finds great political utility in our people's suffering. As long as foreign observers blame outside forces - specifically the United States - and not him, it gives sustenance to his drive for international legitimacy and justification for his stranglehold on the fate of our people. Such is the true nature of his lust for power.
Acceding to Castro's demands for food and medicine is even more of a moral travesty, since it only serves to help prolong the Castro nightmare by absolving the dictator of one more of his failures. It is like meeting the demands of a hostage-taker and the victims still not be freed.
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