It’s unfortunate that we will never know if the Cuban model could fully succeed. The USA couldn’t take that chance so has had to economically throttle the country for over 60 years. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Cuba had been free to trade with the world. Would corruption have taken over? Would they still spend large amounts of GDP on their people? It’s clear the the USA thought they could make it work and the capitalists couldn’t have that ideological competition right on their doorstep. American citizens might have noticed. As it is, we don’t have enough info to know whether the internal problems could have been overcome or whether they would have gotten worse with a larger economy.
The US would have way more doctors too if our education was free. Imagine what Cuba could do if it hasn’t been in a devastating embargo for over 60 years.
That is one of our problems but also we limited the amount of residency position to less than the number of med school graduates so even with the amount of people who finish expensive med school not all of them can get a residency
Generally places with weak economies and robust public higher education tend to have large numbers of educated professionals because it’s a good way to GTFO.
Cuban doctors have restricted travel rights for this very reason … people become doctors because the education it’s free and it’s still s prestigious career.
It certainly helps that the biggest enemy of Cuba is like 200km away and is more than willing to pay for every Cuban doctor that arrives there.
The Kaiser Family Foundation described Cuba as “a shining example of the power of public health to transform the health of an entire country by a commitment to prevention and by careful management of its medical resources.”
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/healthcare-a-priority-for-richard-nixon
You can’t read the rest of it by following the link at the end, I assume someone else bought the domain.
You can read a transcript of Kaiser sending in their jackal, though:
Did you also learn why the embargo is so important to american capitalism?
Why?
It’s a demonstation of a viable alternative system of governance and economics that prioritizes the masses. It would also be rather inconvenient if this was a place that any US Citizen could just pop off to for the weekend. It’s not an embargo of any product or service. It’s an embargo of ideas and protects the lie.
Oh I never thought about that, that the “land of the free” has to ban tourism to Cuba. LOL.
this is how I know you’ve never lived in cuba
Would you say life in Cuba is hard because of the government or the embargo?
yes (Inclusive or)
