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Topic: Fidel, Raul and a bucket (Read 1950 times) |
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Hermit
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Fidel, Raul and a bucket
« on: 2006-08-02 03:32:28 » |
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As most of you are probably aware, the 80 year old Fidel Castro, second longest ruling head of state (Queen Elizabeth just beats him out for first) and head of a country which offers its citizens a great deal more happiness than the USA (Cuba No 6 vs USA No 150 on one ranking, reported here by David Lucifer and Blunderov) has just appointed his 75 year old brother, Raśl Castro, the longest serving defence minister, as head of government pro temps while Fidel recovers from intestinal surgery.
While American sanctions have been in place against Cuba since shortly after Fidel lead a coup against Batista, courted the USA and was rebuffed, so turned to the USSR for support instead, these have not lessened Cuba's enthusiasm for Castro or living without America, even though the sanctions have unarguably massively hurt all Cubans. Even when Fidel had a lot of hair pulling exercises and all Cubans were forced to tighten their belts after the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in an extremely sharp and deep drop in standards of living, support for Castro never wavered, and Castro himself showed no sign of concern. Now this. One might ask what has changed. After all, the threat and reality of sanctions, unlike the emergent one, was not existential. Any threats to the halcyon socialist lifestyle of Cuba were largely venial as opposed to mortal in theological terms.
Now however, like America under GWBush, "everything is changed". You see, Cuba has discovered, evaluated and confirmed a massive underwater oil find. This is in an area, close to Florida but still closer to Cuba than to the USA, and with ownership and utilization confirmed by treaty in 1977. The U.S. Geological Survey has confirmed reserves of 4.6 billion to 9.3 Billion barrels of crude and 9.8 trillion to 21.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. China has already made a deal with Cuba to buy some of it. The USA is trying to figure out how to prevent this and if possible get hold of it for themselves - even if this means abandoning the 45 year old sanctions against Cuba. Given our National Security policy of attacking anyone who threatens American preeminence, is it a wonder that Fidel has ulcers? I suspect that in his combat boots, I would too. Especially given that America is now hoping for "democracy" in Cuba. Looking at what is happening at the last bastion of American democracy, Iraq (noting that the American Republic is not a democracy), this should be sufficient to give anyone a bad night's sleep.
Primary Source: Antiwar.com
Associated Press via CBS News
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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David Lucifer
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Enlighten me.
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Re:Fidel, Raul and a bucket
« Reply #1 on: 2006-08-05 10:15:36 » |
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The HPI doesn't measure happiness, rather it is happiness * life expectancy / ecological footprint. (fyi)
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Hermit
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Re:Fidel, Raul and a bucket
« Reply #2 on: 2006-08-05 21:48:01 » |
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[Lucifer] The HPI doesn't measure happiness, rather it is happiness * life expectancy / ecological footprint. (fyi)
Indeed. Somewhat less self satisfaction, about the same life expectancy and a fraction of the ecological footprint. Much happier effect on the planet. Thank-you for pointing out my error.
Hermit
| Country | Life Satisfaction | Life Expectancy | Ecological Footprint | Happy Planet Index | | USA | 7.4 | 77.4 | 9.5 | 28.8 | | Cuba | 6.3 | 77.3 | 1.4 | 61.9 |
Calculated as:
| Life satisfaction x Life expectancy | | HPI = | ----------------------------------- | | Ecological Footprint |
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Fidel, Raul and a bucket
« Reply #3 on: 2006-08-07 02:38:44 » |
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[Blunderov] The many Cuban doctors that came to the RSA somewhile back were not a great success. Language was a problem obviously. But there was the feeling that they were not fully up to scratch as doctors. Some opinion was that they were not much more skilled than paramedical hospital staff. How much this was justified I cannot say, but the Cubans were soon repatriated or reassigned, no trifling matter in a country with a grave shortage of medical facilities for its (very many) poverty stricken citizens.
That said, having lots of empathic paramedics surging freely about the landscape sounds to me more like "a good thing"* than a bad.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1138362006
We have little to fear and plenty to learn from Fidel's Cuba
BRIAN WILSON
AH, WELL. At least I have been spared the dilemma of whether to slope off a couple of days early from the family holiday in order to attend old Fidel's birthday celebrations in Havana. Because of his state of health, they have been postponed for three months in the hope that he will be back in harness. I wouldn't bet against it.
Still, it was nice to be asked. I have long counted myself as a friend of Cuba and, when in government, I tried very hard to give substance to that description. Not that this involved any special treatment for the country; simply the normal, dignified relationships that Cuba is so often deprived of at American behest, and also, of course, some intelligent recognition of its great humanitarian achievements.
When I became trade minister in 1998, the official in charge of our commercial relationships with the Americas came to see me. He went through the map, describing our activities in markets large and small. There was, however, one notable omission. "What are we doing with Cuba?" I asked innocently. Startled pause. "Well, Minister... we aren't really doing anything with Cuba". There followed some tale of a piffling debt outstanding since the 1980s.
Within a month, we were on a plane to Havana, got the old debt sorted out and that was the start of a relationship I continue to value very highly. It could have produced a lot more, but there were always hidden hands at work making sure that progress was slowed. There were, however, some notable successes, including a Glasgow-Havana twinning and the establishment of close links between a few firms in Aberdeen and Cuba's embryonic offshore oil industry.
The latter initiative arose directly out of a conversation I had with Fidel. It would be enormously bad luck for Cuba, with undisputed rights to one third of the Gulf of Mexico, if their sector was devoid of oil and gas. I explained to him Aberdeen's pre-eminence in offshore technologies and this captured his interest. Their energy minister with his top technocrats were promptly dispatched to learn more, and some beneficial contacts were made and maintained. The scale of Cuban reserves is still being explored, with increasing international participation.
Of course, any company which does business, or wants to do business, in the United States keeps very quiet about anything it is doing in Cuba. This is due to the Helms-Burton Act, wildly illegal in international terms, which gives the US government the right to blacklist companies from other countries that do business with Havana. This is one area in which the British government, and the rest of the EU, condemns the American position, at least in formal terms, because the implications for extra-territorial jurisdiction are so far-reaching.
There is also good practical co-operation between some UK ministries and Cuba on a range of issues from agricultural research to drug enforcement (on which the Cubans are extremely hot). But we could and should have gone a lot further in acknowledging the iniquity of the American policy towards Cuba and, particularly, in recognising the inspirational models that it has to offer the developing world in such fields as pharmaceuticals, healthcare and literacy campaigns. The "special relationship" would withstand at least that.
Of course, the US efforts to impoverish and defeat Cuba through nearly half a century of boycott and subversion are now as hypocritical as they have long been counterproductive. Every time I am in Havana, there is another group of US governors or senators - particularly from the farm states - more than happy to do business with the anti-Christ. The US is now the second biggest exporter of food to Cuba for the simple reason that the farming vote is not prepared to accept official US foreign policy.
It is perfectly true that Cuba is not a western-style democracy (though we in Britain are perhaps not best placed to mock the fact that they have had the same head of state for half a century). Cuba's evolution has been dictated by the paranoia of its near neighbour.
Castro's achievement has been to maintain the support and understanding of the great majority of the Cuban people, even through times of difficulty and privation. They know what they have and they know what they have to lose.
Nowadays Cuba exports few guerrillas but thousands of doctors and teachers to the poorest countries of the world. The planes landing at Havana no longer carry eastern European apparatchiks but western tourists and Venezuelan peasants, bound for life-changing operations under the most cost-effective healthcare system in the world. Cuba is not going to throw all of this away. It will continue to evolve and we should work with it on the basis of mutual respect.
This article: http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1138362006
* This vital phrase will pass most exams with ease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That
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Hermit
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Re:Fidel, Raul and a bucket
« Reply #4 on: 2006-08-07 12:22:15 » |
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I am friends with some of those Cuban doctors. I think that the story of their supposed "incompetence" was based on the fact that to prevent absquatulations and to protect the financial interests of the local medical establishment, the South Africans issued the Cubans with "provisional licenses" valid only for procedures and diagnosis made at or in association with the hospitals they were attached to.
All the Cuban Doctors I met, and I met many, were at least adequately competent. Less technical and more humane than most Western trained doctors might well describe them, nonetheless completely capable. They certainly knew when they had reached the limits of their training or knowledge (which is much more than can be said for many Western doctors) and were not afraid to refer patients to specialists. There is another side to this story. I personally watched, and on a few occasions assisted, some of them perform what seemed to me to be brilliant (in part because they are taught to work extremely fast to minimize risk by reducing operative shock) surgical work under impossible field conditions using only epidurals for pain management and hypnotics to relax the patient. Work that no Western doctor I know would consider, never mind attempt, yet which in my opinion was good for the patients (they knew that if they referred them to larger hospitals, the patients would probably have returned without treatment due to either urgent needs and long queues or only palliative treatment being provided to many classes of patient in the "New South Africa" due to resource constraints). The Cuban doctors made the important point that an epidural carries much lower risks to the patient than general anaesthetic, so that even though it is more challenging for the care givers, they are preferred in Cuba (many years later, the Hermitess, who qualified as a nurse in the Soviet Union, confirmed that they taught this too).
That is the good part of this history.
There is a dark side to this story, not to do with the doctors, but to do with Cuba and indeed, with "the New South Africa" and, AFAIK all the other countries where the Cuban doctors are deployed. Lets start with some background. Before the doctors left Cuba, an agreement was made with the host country. This charged the doctors out at around half the cost per year of a local doctor, paid to the Cuban government, in dollars, in advance. The host country was supposed to provide food, lodging and a per Diem stipend (which was not enough to live on locally). The Doctor would receive some small percentage of the money paid to Cuba for them, in Cuba, in Cuban funds at official exchange rates, if they behaved "appropriately" in the eyes of the Cuban government, but only after their foreign service had been completed. The host country agreed not to allow them to stay, not to provide them with asylum, not to facilitate their non-return to Cuba under any circumstances and to facilitate the Cubans' efforts to recover a doctor who attempted to "escape" or was ordered to return and failed to do so. Only doctors with families were allowed to leave Cuba, and the Cuban doctors' families remained in Cuba to "guarantee" their good behaviour and eventual return. Does this sound like slavery already? There is more.
Each Cuban doctor or group of doctors was provided with a "minder". When three of them attempted to talk to the press about their living arrangements (totally abysmal, South Africa had put them into unfurnished ground maintenance staff buildings - a descriptive term for awfulness which only a South African can fully comprehend), had not provided them with food (which at most of the country hospitals they were at would have been primarily corn porridge (pap) and powdered eggs) and had not paid them even their meagre stipend (far less than I was paying my servants) so they could not remedy the deficiencies themselves, the Cuban government arrested their families and commanded them to return to Cuba. One of the three attempted to escape to Mozambique, and a Cuban team was sent to collect him. South Africa facilitated the "arrest squad" which worked like a more competent version of a CIA "rendition team". I spoke to SAAF personnel who claimed to have seen an unconscious, beaten up person strapped to a stretcher being "rendered" onto a Cuban Ilyushin, and were told that it was a doctor who had "embarrassed" Cuba. Nice?
At which point, I was receptive when one of my Cuban friends asked for help to abscond to somewhere, anywhere. Given their invidious situation, I thought that it would be relatively easy to arrange. In order to get out of sight, he faked measles, and two other Cuban doctors covered for him while I used an ambulance to slip him out of the bush hospital he was supposed to be at. Then followed two weeks of painful time wasting at every embassy in Pretoria trying to see if anyone would accept them. The only reason he could get to see diplomats was because I made the appointments. Nobody would offer asylum, he was merely "an economic refugee" according to the US. Even Canada refused to consider his case. Spain agreed to provide asylum, but would only do so if he asked for it while in transit on a flight via Spain to somewhere else. Unfortunately, it turned out that there are few through flights like this, and he couldn't get a visa for any destination he could fly to via Spain. I suspect that the Spanish embassy may have been aware of this. I then thought that perhaps we could publish the information about this and spoke to my (very good) press connections. It turned out that it was not only a non-story, but that it was a non-story that had friends of mine in high-places calling me to tell me to stop trying to make waves. So after two weeks of non-stop attempts, we held a party for the doctors at the local bush hospital, and he returned to it with the rest of them, his minder none the wiser. While I continued to receive thank-you's in the very acceptable form of cases of rum and boxes of cigars (both beyond superlatives) until I left South Africa, it always irked me that I couldn't help them more. Clearly Cuban doctors are regarded as pariahs everywhere - but it has nothing to do with their medical competence or at least in my experience, their personalities.
Speaking personally it was a very disillusioning experience (and I thought I was already very nearly "properly cynical" before this saga began). It left me feeling dirty, as if my failure to help them had assisted the world in maintaining the institution of slavery and having discovered that, if it is "tagged" appropriately, the world has no objections to it at all.
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Fidel, Raul and a bucket
« Reply #5 on: 2006-08-08 15:43:04 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2006-08-07 12:22:15
I am friends with some of those Cuban doctors... |
[Blunderov] Thank you for relating this rather sad tale. I do not think there was very much else that you could have done. I warmly applaud both your compassion and your tradecraft.
Best Regards
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