20: Myths and mysteries of the Ministry of Health

Beyond its deterioration, the problem with health care in Cuba is not that it’s free, since it’s free in some developed countries as well; the problem is that it is obligatorily free, with no alternatives. Luckily, we Cubans aren’t always getting sick, but even if we were, no one has asked us if we would give up our rights in exchange for being healed.

The myth of Cuba as a “medical power” implies that we are only bodies and that we have sold our souls to a healing power, to the guru of the proletarian tribe. Thousands of doctors have been exported, and in the Island’s hospitals they are replaced with thousands of medical students from Latin America. I have seen our patients’ racial mistrust of them, as well as the logical suspicion that they are not fully trained professionals. At times it’s hard to talk to them in our Cuban dialect. The lack of resources, which are reserved for “salvageable cases,” makes it worse. It depresses me to visit hospitals. I don’t think the hospitals can heal themselves. It’s going to take many billions of screwdrivers, like the one in the picture, to fix the machinery of Cuban medicine. What continues to have the poorest diagnosis is the dream of ever having, in Castro’s Cuba, private medical care.