Mar 2, 2010

Another wonder of Cuba's socialized, government-run, health care system

Cross posted at Iron Curtain Patriots.

Remember in early January, when news broke that twenty something patients died, supposedly of cold and hunger, in Havana’s dreaded mental health hospital, known as Mazorra?

Penúltimos Días (in Spanish) broke the news on January 13th and it went viral all over the internet, including Twitter, where I followed it the most.

[Needles to say, Michael “Sicko”Moore and all the useful idiots claiming the US needs a health care system like Cuba’s never answered any of the urgent pagers!]

The news caused such a mess that the Cuban government, through its only and official fish-wrap, Granma, didn’t have any other choice than to publish a lousy and short note in the back pages, two days after the scandal. Cold was to blame, of course, and an investigation was going to be done.

After a few days, there were more reports that the deaths were actually in the thirty something. My relatives back in the tropical gulag confirmed me that the Public Health Ministry was engaged in a witch-hunt and they wanted to see heads rolling.

Today, also through Ernesto's sources, the pictures of those dead patients, taken while they were at the morgue of the Legal Medicine Institute in Havana, have been made public.

No, these images are not from the Nazi concentration camps.
They are from Havana.

Risking sounding like the lousy lines of the “yellow” TV shows in Spanish – á la Primer Impacto and Al Rojo Vivo – I have to add the images are really STRONG. Therefore, I am limiting myself to post the link only

During the days when these patients died, I was covered by the white stuff around the Rockies, but there was NO snow or significantly subzero temperatures in the tropics. It was a cold front with temperatures near zero, which is colder than usual, but nothing extremely cold.

The government’s sycophants, as usual, conveniently forgot to address basic issues such as: in what state of starvation needs a human body to be in order to die, massively, due to borderline zero temperatures?

What about the bottom line problem of scarcity that Cuba has chronically suffered since the Soviet Union cut down their pipelines, which makes every single person to steal anything they can from their workplaces? – And do not even start with the “It’s the US and the embargo’s fault” crappy line, because food and medical supplies are exempted from the few cosmetic restrictions that are still in place.

What about previous reports and accusations of horror stories in Mazorra – after 1959?

What about the parallel with the atrocities that happen, on a daily basis, in nursing homes and hospitals for regular Cubans?

What about what happened to my aunt, Mercedes and her beautiful green eyes, when I was still a little girl?

UPDATE:  In my Mom's own words, in Spanish, here. It's the second time in her life that she talks about this. The first time it was just the mere "preview" that I used in my post about my aunt. Just now I realized I was only three years old.

What about that?
What the heck happened to the universal health care paradise?!

United Nations, American health care reform champions, Michael Stupid Sicko Moore, Sean Penn and ét al…
WHERE ARE YOU?

PS- And this is coming from the same sources saying that no prisoner has ever been torture in Cuba and that dissident and prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo was a common criminal - a " worthless nigger" to put it in the words of his jailers - that just committed suicided.

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