The dire situation of medical services in Cuba has emerged strongly in recent days. Facing the financial bankruptcy of the State, the regime keeps sending doctors abroad to confiscate 75% of their salaries.
Theoretically, Cuba is one of the countries in the world with more doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, but there are
tens of thousands of them abroad. The doctors available in Cuba are every time less and the primary care to the families has been drastically reduced.
According to official and World Bank data in 2010 there were 36,478 family doctors but in 2017 they were reduced to 13,131. So there are 23,347 fewer family doctors. And with the massive sending of specialists and surgeons abroad, the entire health system has sharply declined.
In 2017, the year in which the regime reported net revenues of 11,379 million dollars for the export of professional services, only $ 428 million were invested in the island public health system.
That is why 64 hospitals have been closed and the country lost 32% of hospitalization capacity, patients bring gifts to their doctors and dentists to be treated, and many surgery procedures are not performed due to lack of surgeons or of surgery supplies. Doctors earn so little that many leave the profession and sell handcrafts on the street or become taxi drivers. The national unhealthiness increases, so that epidemics spread while the lack of medicines at alarming scales.
The deterioration of the hydraulic infrastructure in the central region of the country is hitting several key hospitals which cannot function normally due to daily scanty rationing of the water supply, sometimes up to three days, according to workers and users of those centers. As recent as yesterday it was learned that some of the most important hospitals in the center of the island have to cancel or postpone their surgery schedules due to the lack of potable water.
The only good news on this subject is that the president-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, announced that the exploitation of Cuban doctors in that country was over. If they stay in Brazil they will be paid their full salary, they will be authorized to revalidate their titles, and their families will be able to come from Cuba to join them.
The Cuban population already know that Fidel Castro cheated them three accounts: 1) The “revolution” was never able to cover the costs of health, which were actually covered by the subsidies of the USSR; 2) He used the Kremlin’s money to sell himself as the great humanitarian benefactor abroad and to ensure his permanent power in Cuba; 3) The ultimate goal of the mass graduations of doctors was to export them and confiscate their salaries in hard currency, not to help poor countries as he falsely declared.
At the end of the Soviet subsidies, the medical services collapsed and their true seal was uncovered: “Made in USSR”. The “Cuban medical power” is a scam.