After being granted a visa to fly to South Florida for treatment, Damir Ortiz Ramírez, a young Cuban boy, who was fighting a medical issue passed away on April 5, 2025. Type 1 neurofibromatosis, an uncommon genetic disorder that results in tumors on nerve tissue, was identified as the original source of Damir Ortiz’s ailment. Press accounts indicate he was misdiagnosed with Burkitt’s leukemia in Cuba, leading to inappropriate chemotherapy, which led to kidney damage, further complicating his health.
Sepsis, which was brought on by a multi-resistant bacterial infection Damir had acquired in Cuba, was the direct cause of his death. U.S. physicians at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital verified this, observing advanced sepsis at the time of his arrival. In a Facebook video message, Dr. Miguel Ángel Ruano, who was working on Damir’s case, revealed that the bacteria had a limited reaction to antibiotics and that Damir had multiple organ failure as a result of septicemia. One of the main causes of his death was this infection, which is thought to have been contracted as a result of Cuba’s poor medical system.
There have been other cases over the years. For example, in 2018 Emanuel Zaya, a 14 year old Cuban boy with a basketball size tumor on his face, died after receiving emergency surgery in the United States. A Cuban resident he suffered from polyostotic fibrous dysplasia. According to media reports, “Cuban doctors encountered difficulties treating the tumor so the boy was transported to Miami.” The tumor had appeared on his face when the boy was 11 years old, and grown dramatically over the next three years. The Washington Post reported the death of the boy who had a “basketball-size tumor that was slowly killing him.” According to the Jackson Health Foundation, “[t]he tumor [had] taken over his face, and [had] severely affected the bone structure of his upper jaw and nose.” How is it that Cuba’s much lauded medical system misses such a case and the boy could only receive the care needed when an American missionary helped bring him to the United States?
The Cuban government has engaged in a successful campaign to promote its healthcare system as an “achievement of the revolution” to justify the systematic human rights violations in Cuba providing false data and a narrative.
Some still believe that Cuban medical research will provide answers to cancer and other terrible illnesses. Unfortunately, these are projections into the future. The present, and recent past, as it relates to Cuban patients is different. Take the cases of the above mentioned two Cuban boys who died in an American hospital respectively in 2025, and in 2018.
Cubanet broke a story on the death of at least 13 elderly psychiatric patients in the Holguín Psychiatric Hospital, known as “El ITH”, sources from the health sector reported to the independent news agency on February 16, 2023. Reports from different health care professionals in Holguin on the cause of the deaths: two cited “bronchopneumonia and bronchial aspiration”, and another cited that they had “died from malnutrition, anemia and bronchopneumonia, and “in short, due to poor care,” said one of the doctors, who also alluded to the cold and the lack of supplies suffered by the victims.
Three of 26 patients who died of exposure in January 2010 in Cuba.
This was also not the first time. Images from Havana’s psychiatric hospital, known as Mazorra, were smuggled out in January 2010, revealed that another group of psychiatric inmates endured terrible suffering, and were dying from exposure to the elements. Claudia Cadelo, who is currently outside of Cuba but was living there at the time, wrote in 2010 on how she felt after seeing these pictures:
When I opened the little folder called “Mazorra” a series of monstrosities hit me in the face and I couldn’t stop looking at the cruel graphic testimony. A friend who is a doctor visited and while he analyzed images I didn’t have the courage to look at, expressions like, “Holy Virgin Mary, Blessed God, What in God’s name is this?” issued from his outraged throat, mixed with obscure pathologies and the names of diseases both treatable and curable. Enormous livers, tubercular lungs, and wormy intestines are the proof, Senora Arlin, of the sacredness of life in Cuba. Meanwhile The Roundtable throws a fit because the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo has unmasked a crumbling public health system, and they try to cover up the disgrace of seeing soldiers dragging and beating a group of women dressed in white with flowers in their hands. I ask myself, Gentlemen Journalists, when will they explain to Cubans the reasons why twenty-six mentally incapacitated people died in inhumane conditions during their confinement in Mazorra?
Thanks to the brave independent journalists who made the photographs public and the still-unknown whistleblower who revealed what had occurred, Havana was compelled to acknowledge something had happened. On January 15, 2010, The New York Times reported that “26 patients at a mental hospital died during a cold snap this week, the government said Friday. A Health Ministry communiqué blamed ‘prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees.‘”
These news reports reveal the true nature of the Cuban healthcare system from time to time but the articles seem to disappear down a memory hole, and international organizations that should know better like the World Health Organization (WHO) and its American affiliate the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) aid and abet in the white wash. The Psychiatric Hospital in Havana run by Eduardo Bernabe Ordaz Ducunge for forty years used the tools of psychiatry to torture dissidents and human rights defenders. Despite this history, the PAHO in 1997 awarded Ordaz Ducunge its prize for administration “for his pioneering efforts in establishing rehabilitation programs and in the humanization of hospital care for people suffering from chronic mental illness.”
These are anecdotal examples, but there is also systemic evidence of the Cuban healthcare system’s shortcomings.
Katherine Hirschfeld, is a medical anthropologist who spent time in Cuba examining the healthcare system and author of the book Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 published in 2009.
In 2018, Professor Hirschfeld in the journal Health Policy and Planning made the case for democratic norms generating better results in public health in “Response to ‘Cuban infant mortality and longevity: health care or repression?’” and analyzed the shortcomings found in Havana’s governing style.
”The regime governs from the top down, as a dynastic military dictatorship that does not permit anyone outside the government—no independent associations of health professionals or journalists—to objectively assess policy outcomes. The role of public media in an autocracy is instead to praise the regime and explain away its failures as the work of real or imagined political enemies. Public information about health trends is correspondingly configured to fit these predetermined narratives.”
Daniel Raisbeck and John Osterhoudt at Reason on April 18, 2022 premiered a documentary on “The Myth of Cuban Health Care” that confirms the claims made by Professor Hirschfeld, and is available at the top of this blog entry. The difficulty is that the Castro regime’s propaganda networks and agents of influence continue to push the positive healthcare narrative in the media and academia, and anything that does not fit it is memory holed. Therefore, it is important to share this documentary and counter the false narrative.
Covering up epidemics and outbreaks prior to COVID
Diario de Cuba reported on February 17, 2021 that there is an “acute lack of medicines is allowing controllable diseases to spread throughout Cuba, creating unbearable situations for many families. Such is the case with scabies, which Cubans constantly complain about on social media and that is on its way to becoming widespread in Mayarí, Holguín.” The regime is focusing its media campaign on COVID-19, and their efforts to produce vaccines at home, in collaboration with their Russian, Chinese, and Iranian allies. The scabies epidemic, and others, are not covered. This is not new.
In 1997 when dengue broke out in Cuba, the regime tried to cover it up. When a doctor spoke out, he was locked up, sentenced to 8 years in prison. Amnesty International recognized Dr. Desi Mendoza as a prisoner of conscience, and he was released from prison in 1998 under condition he leave Cuba. The dictatorship eventually recognized that there had been a dengue epidemic.
A 2012 cholera outbreak once again demonstrated how the Cuban public health system operates. News of the outbreak in Manzanillo, in the east of the island, broke in El Nuevo Herald on June 29, 2012 thanks to reporting by the outlawed independent press in the island. Official media did not confirm the outbreak until days later on July 3, 2012. BBC News reported on July 7, 2012 that a patient had been diagnosed with Cholera in Havana. The dictatorship stated that it had it under control. Independent journalist Calixto Martínez was arrested on September 16, 2012 for reporting on the Cholera outbreak, and declared an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. Cholera outbreaks would continue on the island.
The Castro regime succeeded in covering up the 2017 Zika outbreak, but eventually in 2019, due to sick foreign tourists diagnosed with the disease, it was traced back to Cuba. What will we learn about the real Cuban response to COVID-19 on its territory when the dust clears?
434 vs 557 COVID-19 outcomes in the United States and Cuba
The Covid-19 pandemic, mentioned in the 2022 documentary, again demonstrated Havana’s mastery in setting the narrative of “great successes in healthcare by the Cuban Revolution” in contrast with the stark reality on the ground in Cuba.
Once again, it has been discovered that the regime in Cuba substantially under-counted deaths during a disease outbreak that killed huge numbers of Cubans. This has been the case in the past with dengue, cholera, and most recently with COVID-19.
Two numbers stand out: 434 and 557. In the United States, which had well publicized challenges and failures during COVID-19, excess deaths were 434/100,000. While Cuba, which was touted as a success story, had a worse outcome with 557/100,000 excess deaths
“Our World In Data”, a project of the Global Change Data Lab, whose “mission is to publish the ‘research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems’” exposed the failure of Cuba’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They published an interactive map from The Economist, current through June 17, 2024 titled “Estimated cumulative excess deaths per 100,000 people during COVID.” Above is a screen grab, but when you go to the website and hover over a country the data is provided, and you can see the numbers for yourself.
Left out of The Economist report is the evidence that Cuban government officials decided early on that they wanted to be “be the first country in the world to vaccinate their whole population with their own vaccines,” and were willing to let Cubans die while they developed their domestic vaccines instead of importing them, including from their allies Russia and China in order to advance their “healthcare superpower” narrative.
Yet, The Economist in the same article claims that from 2000 through 2020 Cuba outspent other countries in healthcare. Where do they get the data to make such a claim?: the Cuban government. No independent verification. In 2007 Rich Lowry reviewed the Michael Moore propaganda film Sicko in The Salt Lake Tribune and presented a description of the Cuban healthcare system in 2007 that is much the same to the one criticized in 2022 by The Economist.
Trafficking doctors for profit and leverage
It also raises the issue of doctors sent out on medical missions creating a positive buzz about the Cuban healthcare system, while Cuban doctors denounce being trafficked and exploited.
The State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs on April 4, 2025 posted on X: “More than 26,000 Cuban medical workers are sent to an estimated 55 countries, facing exploitation and forced labor while the Cuban regime pockets over $4.9 billion a year. Meanwhile Cubans back home face a health care crisis. #EndHumanTrafficking“
However, these international missions have additional sinister sides. Mary Anastasia O’Grady in her June 14, 2020 column in The Wall Street Journal warned about “Cuban Medical Brigades to Mexico” and more specifically Havana’s “history of using its doctors to propagandize and build intel networks.” Cuban doctors sent to Venezuela were ordered to deny or ration care to advance Nicolas Maduro’s election prospects reported The New York Times in the March 17, 2019 article, “It Is Unspeakable’: How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters,” including the denial of needed oxygen to deathly ill patients.
Equally troubling is that the World Health Organization’s regional office for the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is facing a lawsuit for conspiring with Havana to circumvent Brazilian laws to profit off the trafficking of Cuban doctors.
There is plenty of room to criticize the U.S. healthcare system, but why do so many try to contrast it with the Cuban which is an even worse mess? Why is it that although Costa Rica and Canada’s healthcare systems rate higher than the U.S. on international indices, but are not mentioned positively as often as Cuba’s despite the island nation’s health care system rating lower than these three countries?
Cuban boy battling rare condition dies after obtaining visa to get treatment in Miami
Damir Ortiz was diagnosed with type 1 neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic condition that causes tumors on nerve tissue
A young boy from Cuba who was battling a medical condition died on Saturday after he and his family received a visa to travel to South Florida for treatment.
Damir Ortiz was diagnosed with type 1 neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic condition that causes tumors on nerve tissue.
Ortiz’s family confirmed his death to NBC6’s sister station, Telemundo 51.
On March 12, Ortiz arrived at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital after his family obtained a humanitarian visa.
It wasn’t easy or cheap to get Ortiz to Miami. More than $45,000 was raised in less than 24 hours for his transportation.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/young-cuban-boy-battling-rare-condition-dies-after-obtaining-visa-to-get-treatment-in-miami/3584149/
Graphic detail | Daily chart
Covid-19 has damaged the reputation of Cuban health care
The country’s once-famed health system is in tatters
Aug 3rd 2022
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For a long time Cubans were proud of their health-care system, and justifiably so. Between 2000 and 2020 the small communist-run island outspent most other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Life expectancy is higher than in the United States. Cuba has qualified doctors and nurses to spare. When covid-19 first struck, Cuba sent some of its medics to countries struggling with their initial wave of patients. An impressive 89% of Cuba’s population is now fully vaccinated with its homegrown covid jabs—which boast efficacy rates of up to 92.4% after three doses. But according to The Economist’s excess mortality tracker, Cuba has one of the highest estimated death tolls from the pandemic, relative to its size. Where did it go wrong?
Officially, by August 2022 covid had killed 8,529 of Cuba’s 11m people. But our model estimates that the true toll could be far higher. Excess mortality—the gap between how many people have died in a given period, regardless of cause, and how many deaths would normally have been expected—suggests that up to 62,000 Cubans may have died as a result of the pandemic. That 600% increase over the official toll is probably the result of inadequate testing and other problems. It is possible that officials underreported the deaths, too.
Cuba’s estimated tally of excess deaths per 100,000 people is 550. This revised death toll would place it among the 20 worst countries in the world. It would also make Cuba an outlier in the region: the average across the Americas is 368.
Its ageing population—almost 20% of Cubans are over 60, more than anywhere else in the region—made Cuba especially vulnerable to covid. But other factors were avoidable. Budget cuts and a shortage of essential supplies were taking a toll even before the pandemic. After the outbreak hospitals quickly became overwhelmed; oxygen, personal protective equipment and medicines ran short. And although plenty of Cubans are now vaccinated, the country was slow off the mark. Deaths peaked as late as August 2021, during the Delta wave. In that month only around 35% of Cubans had received a full course of covid vaccinations, compared with 64% of Britons and 54% of Americans. The pandemic has brought to light something Cubans have known for some time, but that officials wanted to keep under wraps: the country’s health-care system is not what it used to be. ■
Reason, April 18, 2022
The Myth of Cuban Health Care
How did something so at odds with reality persist for so long? And why is it finally crumbling?
Daniel Raisbeck and John Osterhoudt | 4.18.2022 10:00 AM
“If there’s one thing they do right in Cuba, it’s health care,” said Michael Moore in a 2007 interview. “Cuba has the best health care system in the entire area,” according to Angela Davis, “and in many respects much better than the U.S.”
“One thing that is well established in the global health community is the strength of the Cuban national health system,” said Clare Wenham, a professor at the London School of Economics.
Claims like these have appeared in hundreds of documentaries, newspaper articles, and magazine features over the years celebrating the supposed marvel of Cuba’s health care system. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of the Castro regime’s propaganda apparatus that this myth, so deeply at odds with reality, has persisted for so long.
“The Cuban health care system is destroyed,” Rotceh Rios Molina, a Cuban doctor who escaped the country’s medical mission while stationed in Mexico, tells Reason in Spanish. “The doctor’s offices are in very bad shape.”
“People are dying in the hallways,” says José Angel Sánchez, another Cuban doctor who defected from the medical mission in Venezuela, interviewed by Reason in Spanish.
According to Rios, Sánchez, and others with firsthand experience practicing medicine in Cuba, the island nation’s health care system is a catastrophe. Clinics lack the most routine supplies, from antibiotics to oxygen and even running water, and their hallways are often occupied by ailing patients because there aren’t enough doctors to treat their most basic needs. Cuban hospitals are unsanitary and decrepit. It’s exactly what you’d expect in a country impoverished by communism.
The only thing that’s changed is that because of social media and the COVID-19 pandemic, the government’s propaganda facade has finally started to shatter.
And yet in 2021, some journalists were falling for the claim that the Cuban government had set the model in its response to COVID-19. By July of that year, ordinary Cubans had taken to the streets—and to Twitter and Facebook—in part to call attention to what the pandemic had actually meant for Cuban hospitals and clinics.
In the 15 years since the release of Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, which celebrated Cuban health care, everyday citizens have been armed with smartphones, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, empowering them to tell the truth about what it’s really like to walk into a Cuban hospital.
So how did the Castro regime’s propaganda machine manage to fool so many for so long? According to Maria Werlau, executive director of the Cuba Archive, the answer lies with Cuba’s foreign medical missions, which are teams of health care professionals dispatched to provide emergency and routine care to foreign countries.
The first medical mission was sent to Algeria in 1963. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the government lost its major source of aid, the program was ramped up significantly as a source of revenue for the impoverished nation.
The Cuban government has promoted the missions as a humanitarian endeavor, and a demonstration of the community spirit and selflessness central to the communist project. In his 1960 speech “On Revolutionary Medicine,” the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara said that “Individualism…must disappear in Cuba.” He recounted the story of a group of physicians in Havana “who demanded remuneration” before going into the country’s rural areas to treat the sick. He dreamed of replacing them with a new class of doctors drawn from the peasantry who would “run, immediately and with unreserved enthusiasm, to help their brothers.”
Rios participated in the medical mission in Sierra Leone in 2013, where health care specialists from around the world came to help contain the Ebola epidemic. The members of the mission were told that when they returned to Cuba, they would be received as heroes. Rios says that, while he did receive a stipend that went to cover his living expenses, medical personnel from other countries were generously compensated.
The myth of Cuban physicians as selfless healers started to fracture in 2000 when two doctors from the mission in Zimbabwe slipped a note to an airline official with the handwritten word kidnapped. They had denounced the Castro regime and were being brought back to Cuba against their will, possibly to face jail time. Instead, they wound up in the U.S. and were granted political asylum.
In a 2020 report, Human Rights Watch said the Cuban medical missions “violate [doctors’] fundamental rights,” including “the right to privacy, freedom of expression and association, liberty, and movement, among others.” It noted that “many doctors feel pressured to participate in the missions and fear retaliation if they do not,” and that “governments that accept Cuban assistance that includes the abusive conditions imposed by Cuba risk becoming complicit in human rights violations.”
In 2006, the George W. Bush administration created the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, granting health care workers stationed abroad permanent resident status. All they had to do was make it to a U.S. embassy. Over 7,000 medical workers took advantage of the program.
In 2014, the New York Times op-ed page published an editorial calling for an end to the program. American immigration policy “should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation,” it noted. In other words, the rights of doctors to decide where and how to live should be subordinate to what was best for the Cuban government.
After the mission in Sierra Leone, Rios was redeployed to a military base in Mexico. One day, he was sent with a group of doctors to buy some phone cards so they could connect with their relatives back home. He decided to make his escape. Rios found a job at a Mexican pharmacy and started saving money to pay a coyote to bring him into the U.S. He was picked up by border officials, and taken to an immigrant detention center for 42 days. After his release, he could join his family in Miami.
In 2018, a group of Cuban doctors who defected from the medical missions sued the Pan American Health Organization, which is part of the World Health Organization, for aiding in human trafficking and for earning $75 million in fees by acting as a middle man.
The medical missions are primarily a way of selling Cuban health care services abroad. So what’s health care like for those living on the island?
Julio Cesar Alfonso is the president of the Miami-based Solidarity Without Borders, which helps Cuban doctors who have escaped. He says that there are two health care systems in Cuba—one that is used by the majority of regular citizens, and another that is reserved for tourists and the Cuban elite.
When defenders of Cuban health care acknowledge its deficiencies at all, they usually point the finger at the U.S. trade embargo, which has been in place since 1962. But the deplorable conditions in Cuban hospitals have more to do with a lack of basic health care supplies, which are readily available from other countries, such as antibiotics and steroids. Cuban hospitals also have a shortage of beds and stretchers, and some were without water for six to 12 hours a day at the height of the pandemic.
So what impact does the embargo really have on Cuban health care? Medical products have been technically exempt from the embargo since the passage of the 1992 Cuba Democracy Act. But the law does stipulate that U.S. companies need a license in order to sell to Cuba—and critics are correct to point out that this requirement adds red tape to the process. Total U.S. health care products purchased by Cuba from 2003 to 2021 averaged a mere $1.4 million annually, in what should be a $50 to $100 million market. But it’s not the licensing process that accounts for such paltry sales; companies would gladly obtain permission to sell their products to Cuba if they could earn enough money to make it worth the effort. Cuba has a severe foreign currency shortage because it produces little in the way of goods and services that the rest of the world apart from the U.S. wants to buy.
Promoters of Cuban health care often cite the country’s infant mortality rate as evidence of its success. “How is this possible” that “an American infant is, by official statistics, almost 50 percent more likely to die than a Cuban infant,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in a 2019 New York Times column that looked at one of the most often repeated figures in support of the claim that there’s something exceptional about Cuba’s health care system.
While conceding that “the figures should be taken with a dose of skepticism,” Kristof chose to interpret them regardless in support of his priors: “Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about.”
Cuba has a variety of strategies for manipulating its infant mortality rate, such as seeing to it that fetuses less likely to survive outside the womb never get the chance. There’s significant evidence that Cuban doctors coerce women into aborting fetuses shown to have abnormalities after routine ultrasounds.
Vincent Geloso, who’s an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, co-authored a 2018 paper arguing that Cuba’s low infant mortality rate is the result of misclassification using a different indicator known as “late fetal deaths.”
Despite reports early in the pandemic that Cuba was an outlier in its success in combating COVID-19, by August of 2021 The New York Times was reporting that Cuba’s health care system was “reeling,” with oxygen supplies running low, a shortage of syringes, and mortuaries and crematories “overwhelmed.” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed the U.S. trade embargo.
Sánchez thinks that, as the Castros’ health care myth crumbles, ordinary Cubans are beginning to realize that they are not threatened by foreign enemies, as the regime propaganda machine has claimed for decades.
“The only enemy of the Cuban people,” he says, “is the Cuban government.”
Written and hosted by Daniel Raisbeck and Jim Epstein; narrated by Daniel Raisbeck; edited by John Osterhoudt; camera by Epstein, Osterhoudt, Isaac Reese, and Meredith Bragg; graphic design by Nathalie Walker; animations by Reese and Osterhoudt; additional editing support by Regan Taylor; additional research by Alexandra De Caires; translation assistance by María Jose Inojosa Salina; English subtitles by Caitlin Peters.
Photo credits: KRISTIN CALLAHAN – ACEPIXS.COM/Newscom; KEYSTONE Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; United Nations Photo/Flickr/Creative Commons; Claudio Furlan/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Ipa/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Ipa/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Claudio Furlan/ZUMA Press/Newscom;United Nations Photo/Flickr/Creative Commons; */Kyodo/Newscom; RG72/wikimediacommons/Creative Commons; IAEA Imagebank/Flickr/Creative Commons; Sandrine Huet / Le Pictorium/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Angelo Cozzi/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Ernesto Mastrascusa/EFE/Newscom; Eye Ubiquitous/Newscom; Eye Ubiquitous/Newscom; Kike Calvo/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Eye Ubiquitous/Newscom
https://reason.com/video/2022/04/18/the-myth-of-cuban-health-care/
No Country Magazine, May 14, 2021
The Ten Days in Mazorra of Damaris Betancourt
By Carlos A. Aguilera
1
Although the use of “psychological profiling” was common practice in the European communist parties of the 20th century —including those carried out by the Stalinist Popular Socialist Party (PSP) in Cuba during the years of the Republic— as historian Julio César Aguilera recalls in a recent interview about his book El soviet caribeño. La otra historia de la revolución cubana (2018),[1] it is also true that it was not until 1959 —at least on the island— that psychiatry became a state device, a functional fold of the punitive machine.
The latter is not only supported by The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba (1992),[2] the excellent study by Brown and Lago on the horror that twenty-seven political prisoners had to live through between the 1970s and 1980s at the Havana Psychiatric Hospital (popularly known as Mazorra, having been founded in 1857 on land that bore that name), but documents such as those of the National Conference of Psychiatric Institutions in 1963, where the role of the new institution and its submission to the hygienic-ideological model that Castroism was struggling to put into practice is made clear:
[…] it is necessary to work together with the comrades of the Ministry of the Interior on this aspect, in the proposed law, in the future articles on the mental hygiene thing, of how these issues should be foreseen; first foreseen, and also how they should be dealt with, how these issues should be defined, so that the Revolution has a defined criterion, not the criterion of the Ministry of Public Health or the Ministry of the Interior, but a criterion as a whole of the Revolution on these issues […]. We believe that at least it should be remarked that we are going to work together, with all the factors involved in this, in the treatment of these issues. And, furthermore, in the matter of mental hygiene, which undoubtedly mental hygiene cannot be, in a socialist country, considered apart from living conditions; that is to say, there is no mental hygiene without overcoming living conditions. So, mental hygiene is being carried out, in any case, when making the Revolution and building socialism. But even that has to be included in the Law.[3]
A model which —as is well known— not only acted against the “dark areas” of society, that is, where crime affects the majority, but against homosexuals, dissidents, “elvispreslians,” “sons of bourgeois,” people who did not want to work, “sick people,” and against all those who did not fit in the sacrificial territory, in the pure image of the pure (and revolutionary) man that was demanded.
Had not Fidel Castro made this same demand very clear in his well-known “Closing speech for the VI anniversary of the assault to the presidential palace,” delivered in March 1963, where he not only asked for more production, but also imposed a sort of horizon of offering, of guilty devotion before the Moloch-revolution?
To work with enthusiasm always, no matter the obstacles, no matter the action of the enemy, no matter the ignorant! Reason is with us, we are in the right, we have the energy, we have the initiative, we have history with us![4]
Moloch that would have among its main virtues the one of showing the way to the “people” through punishment, voluntary work, null gratification, precariousness, collective vigilance and censorship…
Through applause.
Reason that, if we look at the countless number of people escaping by sea since the seventies, plus Camarioca (1965), Mariel (1980), the Rafting Crisis (1994), or the individual and massive defections in different countries…, Cubans never fully grasped (on the contrary, all these escapes will eventually become one of the great economic and symbolic tragedies of totalitarianism), although in some areas or communities it has apparently been imposed.
One of these areas will be precisely mental health.
An area managed in Cuba from the psychopolitical sphere —to use one of the terms in vogue in Cuba in the sixties— something that, as can be inferred from the above, started much earlier, much, much, much earlier even than that National Conference of Psychiatric Institutions organized by the Ministry of Health, inaugurated only two years earlier, the medical services of the MININT and the —already by then— very well structured Cuban State Security, built from the old Stalinist center of the PSP and the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) created by Raul Castro on the Sierra Maestra; it began —it could be said— with that feature in Bohemia in 1959, “El hospital de dementes de Mazorra: una vergüenza nacional,”[5] and its narrowing of the whole past (the whole republic) to a locus occupied by evil, a compromise of “incapacitated men without conscience.”
Story that, as Pedro Marqués de Armas rightly qualifies in Ciencia y poder en Cuba (2014), was nothing more than the “old discourse of the Cuban frustration, now with particular emphasis on the opposition shamelessness/cleaning up, a duet that had been gaining strength since the 1940s”.[6]
(By the way, in the editorial of that same issue of Bohemia magazine, Batista’s “totalitarian regime” is compared to the concentration camps of Dachau and Lidice).
Is it not precisely this blank slate, this ideological-mental hyperbole that Castro’s terror takes advantage of to impose its vision, its identity vampirization?
This is what can undoubtedly be seen in two very different pieces that happen to have been created around the same years:
—Jesús Muñoz’s documentary, La revolución de Mazorra (1999); an agitprop film by the regime to show the “excellence” of its psychiatric institution, with distressing fragments of slavery and caricature, where patients receive constant orders and look like fake Stakhanovs.
—And Damaris Betancourt’s photographic series, Diez días en Mazorra (1998); a project of about one hundred images that with almost the same people and under very similar conditions achieves a very different punctum to Muñoz’s La revolución…
https://nocountrymagazine.com/the-ten-days-in-mazorra-of-damaris-betancourt/
The Washington Post, April 5, 2021
Opinion: Cuba’s powerhouse status comes through repression
April 5, 2021 at 4:35 p.m. EDT
The March 31 news article “Cuba could become a vaccine powerhouse” pointed out that Havana wants to soften its image as a “broadly authoritarian country” that has done “some pretty bad things.” Cuban doctors and journalists who raised the alarm in prior outbreaks on the island were locked up and punished.
Desi Mendoza Rivero was arrested on June 25, 1997, for warning about a dengue epidemic in Cuba. On Nov. 24, 1997, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for “enemy propaganda.” Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience and campaigned for his freedom. Dr. Rivero’s claims were eventually confirmed, and he was forcibly exiled.
On Sept. 2, 2016, the Associated Press reported that Cuba had “remarkable success in containing Zika virus.” On Jan. 8, 2019, New Scientist reported the whole story when the facts became known: “Cuba failed to report thousands of Zika virus cases in 2017.”
Repression patterns during this pandemic in Cuba indicate officials seek to downplay covid-19’s severity on the island. According to Duane Gubler at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, “Cuba has a history of not reporting epidemics until they become obvious,” and that is pretty bad.
John Suarez, Falls Church
The writer is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.
2oceansvibe, April 29, 2020
Uncomfortable Truths About The Cuban Doctors That Just Arrived In SA
by Jasmine Stone in Health, Lifestyle, Politics, South Africa, Video
In the early hours of Monday morning, more than 200 healthcare professionals from Cuba touched down on South African soil.
Arriving at the Waterkloof Air Force Base in Pretoria to great fanfare, Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize says they came at the government’s request.
Mkhize added that they would be deployed across the country based on the spread of the pandemic – you can see that breakdown here.
Some footage of the arrival, complete with flag-waving and a speech from Naledi Pandor, our Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, via News24:
Given that a surge in coronavirus-related cases is very likely to follow the easing of the lockdown restrictions on Friday, bringing in all the help we can get seems fair enough.
As TimesLIVE notes, though, it’s pretty expensive help:
The group consists of experts in epidemiology, biostatistics, and public health, family physicians, health care technology engineers and experts to provide technical assistance…
…projected costs for a medical brigade of 187 Cuban personnel was R440m. An even bigger contingent arrived in SA on Sunday, consisting of 217 personnel, the publication reported.
The documents showed that the average cost of the Cuban medical brigade was projected at R2.35m a person.
Mkhize has stressed multiple times that the Cuban arrivals have “come to assist us and they will be working alongside South Africans”, and that they are not a threat to local employment.
The South African Medical Association (Sama) isn’t so sure, and they have criticised the government’s actions. IOL below:
Sama chairperson Dr Angelique Coetzee said South Africa has many public and private health specialists, family physicians and epidemiologists who would have heeded the president’s call for assistance during this very challenging period.
“Retired doctors can be brought back into the service delivery system – even for a short time. They can also mentor younger doctors who lack the necessary experience and skills.
“Only when we have exhausted all our internal human resources should a consultative process between Sama, the Department of Health and the Presidency been initiated to bring the Cuban specialists to South Africa,” Coetzee said…
“While we are not averse to the so-called Cuban Brigade assisting us, we feel strongly that the principle of not engaging with Sama – as the biggest representative body of doctors in the country – is flawed and wrong,” Coetzee said.
Coetzee pointed out that there are many unemployed doctors in the country, and said the decision to look abroad at this time was a “little bit premature”.
It’s also worth noting that Sama says a local public sector registrar or mid-level medical officer, which is roughly comparable to a Cuban family physician, earns around R1,2 million per year.
Yet the average cost of the Cuban medical brigade is projected to come in at around R2,35 million a person?
Seems a little strange.
Before you think that the Cuban healthcare professionals will be raking it in, remember that the country has been under communist rule since 1965.
Fidel Castro was a big fan, describing the medics involved in his country’s international missions as Cuba’s “army of white coats”, and a sign of solidarity with people around the world.
A BBC report from last year exposed how many of those “white coats” weren’t always sure what they were in for:
According to a report by Prisoners Defenders, a Spain-based NGO that campaigns for human rights in Cuba and is linked to the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) opposition group, doctors on average receive between 10% and 25% of the salary paid by the host countries, with the rest being kept by Cuba’s authorities.
In the case of Dayli Coro, who agreed to join a medical mission to Venezuela, she voluntarily signed a contract that she wasn’t given time to read, and was not given a personal copy to look over.
She then found herself in an area so riddled with crime, that it resembled a war zone, and feared for her life:
“There were many criminal gangs,” says Dayli. “When they fought, they brought their injured to us, because the local Venezuelan hospital had a police presence, and we didn’t. These kids would bring in a patient with 12 or 15 bullets in his body, point their guns at you and say you had to save him. If he died, you would die. That kind of thing happened on a daily basis. It was routine.”
…”Once an ambulance was shot up by another gang and a Venezuelan doctor and the driver were killed,” Dayli adds. “There was always the possibility that the rival gang might try to finish off the patient during the transfer. I had a situation where a rival gang came in and shot the patient dead.
A report compiled by Cuban Prisoners Defenders, based on testimony from 46 doctors, said that 41% had their passports removed by a Cuban official when they arrived at their destination, 91% were watched over by Cuban security officials during their mission (and encouraged to snitch on colleagues who voiced discontent), and 39% said they felt “strongly pressured” to serve abroad.
You can read the full BBC report here.
None of the Cuban healthcare professionals that have touched down in South Africa have raised any concerns, but it seems strange that we would look overseas for help, when so many in South Africa are without work.
Then again, our government has repeatedly stressed how strong our bond is with Cuba. This from our government website back in 2016, in the wake of Fidel Castro’s passing:
Castro left his mark on history as a renowned internationalist and anti-imperialist, who selflessly supported the struggles of the oppressed and the exploited.
He stood in solidarity with liberation movements in Africa, supporting our struggle for independence and the international campaign to isolate the apartheid regime.
Relations between South Africa and Cuba are significant. They were forged in the common struggle against apartheid and colonialism on the African continent.
The more cynical among us might view it is as a fundraising event by a foreign government at our expense, and with our government’s backing, as Cuba suffers through trade embargos and sanctions.
Whatever the case, with ministers like Tito Mboweni saying that locally-owned businesses must hire more South African workers, our government’s haste to look abroad should raise a few eyebrows.
[sources:news24×live&iol&bbc&govza]
The New York Times, January 15, 2020
Cuba: 26 Patients at Mental Hospital Die in Cold Snap
By The Associated Press
Twenty-six patients at a mental hospital died during a cold snap this week, the government said Friday. A Health Ministry communiqué blamed “prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees,” but the ministry also said it was starting an investigation that could lead to criminal proceedings. The independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights said that at least 24 patients at the Psychiatric Hospital in Havana died of hypothermia, and that the hospital did not do enough to protect them because of problems like faulty windows.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 16, 2010, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Cuba: 26 Patients at Mental Hospital Die In Cold Snap.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/americas/16briefs-Cuba.html
The Washington Post, January 22, 2018
A boy’s basketball-size tumor was slowly killing him. He died days after doctors removed it.
by Cleve R. Wootson Jr. January 22 at 10:38 AM
The basketball-size tumor was finally gone, and the first signs after Emanuel Zayas’s surgery were deceptively encouraging.
The 14-year-old’s eyes had begun to react to stimulation. The muscles on his face were strengthening. For a moment, his family, doctors and other supporters exhaled.
But inside, the teen was already dying, according to Miami NBC-affiliate WTVJ.
Days after the surgery, Emanuel’s lungs began to fail. His kidneys were going, too. Soon, the people praying for the boy brought to U.S. doctors by missionaries came to a sobering truth: There would be no miracle.
“After visiting Emanuel last night and observing a glimmer of hope from pupillary reflexes and facial muscle tone, I was informed this morning that he took a serious turn for the worse,” Robert E. Marx, the lead surgeon on the teen’s case, said Friday in announcing Emanuel’s death. “His condition has deteriorated with kidney and lung failure that the best of [the intensive care unit] cannot keep pace.”
Emanuel, a ninth-grader from Cuba, was born with a disorder called polyostotic fibrous dysplasia, in which the body replaces portions of bones with fibrous tissues, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The condition began affecting Emanuel’s left arm and leg when he was 4, but it became life-threatening in adolescence, according to the Associated Press.
At age 11, the boy noticed what he thought was a pimple on the side of his nose. But it wouldn’t stop growing. By December, it had ballooned to 10 pounds and was the size of his head.
“The tumor has taken over his face, and has severely affected the bone structure of his upper jaw and nose,” according to the Jackson Health Foundation, a nonprofit group that raises money for cases such as Emanuel’s.
His family had paraded him to a carousel of Cuban doctors, but they all refused to touch the boy. The tumor was too complex, they told his family, the surgery too risky.
But the only alternative was death. The tumor itself was benign; its cells would never spread to other parts of his body. But as it grew, it crushed Emanuel’s windpipe. Doctors feared that the massive tumor would snap Emanuel’s neck if it didn’t choke or starve him first.
Hope came in the form of U.S. missionaries who had met the boy in Cuba and sought to connect him with Marx, chief of oral and maxillofacial surgery for the University of Miami Health System, according to the Miami Herald.
Marx had originally heard about Emanuel’s case at a medical conference. He was one of the few people who could identify it on sight, according to the Herald, because he had operated on a Haitian woman with a 16-pound facial tumor a decade ago.
Marx and the other doctors in Emanuel’s case donated their time, and several benefactors raised money to help pay for the procedure.
They kept track of Emanuel’s progress on a Facebook page set up by Jaynie Estrada, a missionary who led the fundraising effort.
“Update! VICTORY!!” Estrada posted on Jan. 13, just after the surgery. “Emanuel is ok, had a good night. They changed his bandages this morning and swelling is already starting to decrease slightly. The wounds are not bleeding, everything looks good.
But soon, there were signs of trouble.
“Dr. Marx won’t start waking him up tomorrow as we’d hoped,” Estrada wrote on Jan. 18. “Looks like he needs more days to recover more. … Please continue to pray for him.”
He died the next day.
The teen’s restoration, his supporters believed, no longer lay in earthly hands.
“Through the eyes of our faith, in our hearts, we really believe and know without doubt that Emanuel effectively received a complete healing and that now he has a perfect and sweet face and two legs that work, and that he is running and jumping and having fun in heaven right now,” Estrada posted.
Huffington Post, May 19, 2010
Is Life Sacred In Cuba?
These words of Arlin Rodriguez, from the TV talk show The Roundtable on March 17, thundered in my ears for half an hour. A few days ago I had access to three hundred photos of the autopsies of those who died at the psychiatric hospital in Havana and I cannot imagine how that phrase came out of the mouth of a journalist.
When I opened the little folder called “Mazorra” a series of monstrosities hit me in the face and I couldn’t stop looking at the cruel graphic testimony. A friend who is a doctor visited and while he analyzed images I didn’t have the courage to look at, expressions like, “Holy Virgin Mary, Blessed God, What in God’s name is this?” issued from his outraged throat, mixed with obscure pathologies and the names of diseases both treatable and curable.
Enormous livers, tubercular lungs, and wormy intestines are the proof, Senora Arlin, of the sacredness of life in Cuba. Meanwhile The Roundtable throws a fit because the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo has unmasked a crumbling public health system, and they try to cover up the disgrace of seeing soldiers dragging and beating a group of women dressed in white with flowers in their hands. I ask myself, Gentlemen Journalists, when will they explain to Cubans the reasons why twenty-six mentally incapacitated people died in inhumane conditions during their confinement in Mazorra?
Note: I publish this photo with a completely clear conscience; if they were not shown there would be no proof of the suffering that these people were subjected to. If not for the hard photos that denounced the Nazi Holocaust, the genocide of Pol Pot or the tortures in the prisons of Abu Ghraib, they, too, would not have existed.
05/19/2010 05:12 am ET Updated Dec 06, 2017
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leaked-photos-prevent-cub_b_506586
The New York Sun, August 8, 2006
Eduardo Ordaz, 84, Leading Cuban Psychiatrist
By The Daily Telegraph | August 8, 2006
Eduardo Bernabe Ordaz Ducunge, who has died at 84, was director of Havana’s psychiatric hospital for more than 40 years.
The post earned him popular acclaim among pro-Castro Cubans for his eccentric approach, but criticism from international human rights groups and vilification from exiles in the United States who said that the hospital was used to torture political dissidents.
Ordaz admitted that critics of the regime were sometimes kept in the sprawling hospital complex, near Jose Marti International Airport, but insisted that they were”admitted”and treated — electric shocks included — purely as part of necessary and legitimate medical therapy. Many anti-Castro exiles who spent time in the hospital, known to Cubans as the Mazorra after a 19th-century Spanish colonial landowner, begged to differ.
His most extreme critics compared Ordaz with the Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who performed experiments on Jewish inmates at Auschwitz. Although there were never any reports of dissidents dying in the hospital, nor any evidence that Ordaz was directly involved in their maltreatment, human rights groups blamed him for at least turning a blind eye while Fidel Castro’s intelligence agents mistreated — and sometimes tortured — critics of the regime in outlying “punishment pavilions” or self-contained wards.
International psychiatrists, including some from Britain, often described the Mazorra as a “model hospital.” Cuban exiles previously held within its walls, however, said foreign visitors were given a “sanitized” tour of the hospital, and kept well away from the “pavilions” that housed dozens of political dissidents among the 2,000 regular patients.
International human rights groups began focusing on the hospital after the American publication, in 1991, of a book which documented more than 30 named cases of what it called psychiatric abuse in the hospital, involving psychotropic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Castro first saw inside the hospital on January 9 1959, the day after he entered Havana, having forced Fulgencio Batista to flee the country. He described it as “a Dante’s inferno,” noting that the 6,000 inmates were mostly naked, manacled and unattended, with no electricity or running water. He appointed Ordaz to take charge there and then.
Ordaz gave patients jobs in the hospital, formed a 115-strong orchestra (a few of them patients) specializing in Wagner and Beethoven, and initiated beauty and ballet classes.
Among his well-known patients was the Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, who received treatment for his cocaine habit in 2000.
A “museum” maintained by Ordaz inside the hospital, mainly consisting of photographs, showed the horrific conditions during Batista’s dictatorship. In later years, Castro was to boast that the hospital was a symbol of his “enlightened” health policies.
This claim was undermined when a former dissident, visiting a relative at a clinic in Miami in 1991, recognized an elderly male nurse. The visitor did not have the slightest doubt that it was Heriberto Mederos, who had tortured him with electric shocks at the Mazorra. Mederos, by then 78 and an American citizen, was arrested on charges of torturing political prisoners. He was eventually convicted in August 2002 (though only of lying to immigration officers about his past); he was sentenced to five years in jail but died soon afterwards.
Among those who testified at his trial was Belkis Ferro, who was only 15 when she was sent to the Mazorra for being a “rebellious teenager” and refusing to take part in Communist Party youth groups. She testified that Mederos had given her electric shocks and insulin shots against her will.
Eduardo Bernabe Ordaz Ducunge was born in Havana on October 13, 1921. He worked as a shoeshine boy before entering Havana University’s Faculty of Medicine in 1942, graduating in 1951 and specializing in anaesthesia.
While studying, he became active in the underground anti-Batista movement and had been jailed 13 times before he joined Castro’s “Rebel Army” as a medic in 1958, rising to the rank of captain.
Hearing of his role both in combat and tending the wounded, Castro named him Comandante on the day Batista fled. But, though he continued to drive a Russian-made military Jeep to and from the hospital, and was buried with full military honors, Ordaz spent most of his life as a civilian. He was known for his thick beard and high brimmed sombrero, and acquired the nickname “el Loco” (the Madman) for his eccentricities.
He served as a deputy in the Cuban National Assembly from its inception in 1976 until his health failed in 2003. He died on May 21.
https://www.nysun.com/obituaries/eduardo-ordaz-84-leading-cuban-psychiatrist/37526/