Cuba's hospitals are as grubby as its dictatorship

Bristol University professor Chris Bertram doesn't have much time for decent people on left and right who are pleased to see the back of Fidel Castro. After acknowledging Castro's tyranny and brutality, Bertram doesn't actually say he nonetheless made the trains run on time, but he trots out the usual Castro apologist line about "decent standards of health care" in Cuba in a spirited defence of the island's five decades of dictatorship. At CommentIsFree, the former Labour MP Brian Wilson makes a similar argument.

While such arguments should be treated with the contempt they deserve, it is important that they also meet with rational refutation - as they do when they come up against even basic research. In 1959, Fidel Castro inherited one of the most literate populations in Latin America and an advanced health sector, with as many physicians and dentists per head as the Netherlands, and more than the UK. The US State Department's web site notes on infant mortality:

Cuba's infant mortality rate of 32 per 1,000 live births in 1957 was the lowest in Latin America and the 13th lowest in the world, according to UN data.  Cuba ranked ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, and Spain, all of which would eventually pass Cuba in this indicator during the following decades.

Cuba’s comparative world ranking according to data in Table 1 has fallen from 13th to last out of the 25 countries examined.

According to TheRealCuba.com, images such as the above from filthy Cuban hospitals have featured in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Cuba's relatively impressive health outcomes are a result of a population often said to be 'obsessed' with staying healthy, and are in spite of hospitals as grubby as the country's dictatorship.

If and when Cuba achieves democracy one day, with the whole truth about the Castro regime emerging, I suspect most of those who now look desperately for silver linings in the country's tyranny will admit to all the wickedness and misery inflicted by Castro, just as they now have over Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. But as with these appalling precedents, I fear far too many of them will also cheerfully and sincerely explain that alas, Castro's Cuba simply never achieved socialism, and genuine socialists like themselves knew all along how bad things were.