Cuba, on the other hand, is a country that courageously decided, 58 years years ago, to buck the capitalist standard, and initiate along the road of socialist development. As a result, despite the problems they continue to work through to properly build their socialist system, they are a government that is dedicated to eradicating the dominance of capital. And, they are to be righteously commended for their genuine efforts in this regard because they are answering the essential question that their alleged critics on the left could not even form their mouths to address: How does a collective society come together to build a truly democratic society where people's needs dominate over money? Cuba deserves more than many people today will ever realize for their boldness in attempting to answer that critical question, but already, they deserve respect for their outstanding advancements in all areas of health care. Since the beginning stages of their socialist revolution in 1959 they have prioritized eradicating health issues and disparities in their country, and in 1959 they had many. Since that time they have developed a system where there is roughly one doctor for every 100 people. This is compared to their neighboring Caribbean countries like Haiti and Jamaica where there are thousands of people for every doctor. And, they not only prioritized creating doctors by making the university education, including medical school, free of charge. Their medical education included a socialist orientation of training their doctors to see service to the world and humanity as a responsibility that is steeped in moral incentive. And, because they have this socialist political education foundation, their doctors don't graduate with the focus on rewarding themselves for their education after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for their degrees.
So, with that type of solid human focused socialist foundation, it is no wonder over the last 50 years, Cuba has completely eliminated disease that is quite common in other Caribbean countries like dysentery, cholera, and even malaria. And despite the crippling U.S. economic blockade against Cuba (since 1961), which has prohibited any technological trade with Cuba from virtually every resource in the world capable of providing it, their highly conscious medical community hasn't blinked an eye. They have discovered creative and natural medicines in place of the medicines they were not permitted to trade for. And all they have done with that is eliminate mother to child HIV transmissions, cervical cancer, and they have avoided the pandemics like diabetes and hypertension that adversely affect practically every other country with large African populations on the planet Earth.
And the Cubans didn't stop there. Their standard of health e.g. the health index of their people, is the best in the world. They encourage healthy living and eating and their government sponsored bicycle program, despite it being generated partially because of the blockade against newer automobiles being imported, has played a major role in advancing a healthy exercise based lifestyle for Cubans. They made medical school available, and free to hundreds of thousands of students who wanted a medical degree, including many from the U.S. As a result of their system they have developed and sent doctors all over the world to serve humanity. When the alleged Ebola outbreak took place in Africa in 2015, while the U.S. initially sent troops, Cuba sent doctors. Hundreds of them. They have doctors in countries all over the world, including within inner city communities and reservations within the U.S. Places many U.S. trained doctors would never agree to go to.
Any side by side comparison. Any numerical analysis. Any study of anything even the imperialist World Health Organization has to say about world health, acknowledges that Cuba's medical and health care system is the best in the world, hands down. So, stop talking about what's happening in Canada and Europe. Cuba has done so much more with so much less. Why? Because of socialism. A concrete fact many so-called progressives always want to leave out when discussing Cuba's health care system. Without Cuba's Marxist/Leninist socialist system, you don't have the health care gains mentioned here. And I can say that without being a Marxist/Leninist. Truth is truth and give due credit where it belongs. Socialism won't fall out of the sky. It has to be built and that's a process. Real revolutionaries understand this and are not stuck in trying to play some stupid ideological purity game where mistakes never happen. Cuba is building and moving forward.
So for all the so-called progressives, especially those within the U.S. and its most backward health care system, who keep crediting Europe and Canada as having the world's most progressive health care systems, stop parroting this anti-communist line. What people should be looking at is if Cuba, a small country of 10 million people with an island economy, can accomplish all that it has with heath care, what is possible under one unified socialist Africa with all its resources properly organized and utilized? What of the resources available in the industrialized U.S.? What could happen if that organized apparatus was set up to administer a socialist health care system instead of the fraud posing as health care in the U.S. today? Even many of the basic economies in the neo-colonial micro-states in Africa today have health care systems that are more advanced and humanistic than the capitalist system in the U.S. that is based on private health care that prioritizes profit over making people healthy. Free universal health care under socialism! That's clearly what everyone wants so let's declare it and make it come about.