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Obama: US can Learn About Human Rights from Cuba, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 21, 2016

Does Cuba have something to teach us about human rights? Considering Obama and Castro’s attitude toward the rights protected by our Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press and the Right to Bear Arms, not to mention the Right to Compulsory Insurance, you can see why Obama would find the Communist dictatorship inspiring.

“President Castro, I think, has pointed out that it, in his view making sure that everybody is getting a decent education or health care, has basic security in old age, that those things are human rights as well.”

“The goal of the human rights dialogue is not for the United States to dictate to Cuba how to govern themselves,” Obama continued. “Hopefully, we can learn from each other.”

Cuban health care is quite impressive. And by “impressive”, I mean that it’s a good way to die. It also depends on a population of plantation doctors who are leased as slave labor to other countries.

Then there is the real Cuban system, the one that ordinary people must use — and it is wretched. Testimony and documentation on the subject are vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”

The equipment that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent. Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice. When they travel to the island, on errands of mercy, American doctors make sure to take as much equipment and as many supplies as they can carry.

And doctors are not necessarily privileged citizens in Cuba. A doctor in exile told the Miami Herald that, in 2003, he earned what most doctors did: 575 pesos a month, or about 25 dollars. He had to sell pork out of his home to get by. And the chief of medical services for the whole of the Cuban military had to rent out his car as a taxi on weekends. “Everyone tries to survive,” he explained.

If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. As long as he’s willing to sell pork out of his home to make ends meet.

And of course there are Castro’s progressive education policies.

“I say it is one of the achievements of the revolution that even our prostitutes are university educated,” Fidel Castro said.

And that’s true. Their university education however is worthless.

With food rations being cut to malnutrition levels, the average family can live only if it somehow obtains dollars. This makes prostitution all the more appealing for women who are trying to support themselves or their families. Though prostitution does not appear to be an option for men, they are also abandoning their professional positions and choosing to work in the tourism industry as bar tenders, parking valets, bellhops and waiters in hopes of making dollars. Dollars are the means of survival in Cuba, where one in eleven people holds a university degree and there are more doctors and teachers per capita than almost any where else in the world.

We’re headed this way too with the education bubble. Some are already there.

But Obama is pushing the leftist FDR line of positive entitlements as rights over negative rights that are freedoms. Give up your freedom, get free stuff. Look how well it worked out in Cuba.

This entry was posted on March 22, 2016 at 1:47 AM and is filed under Cuba, Human rights, Obama. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Cuba, human rights, Obama