Cuba does not have a major hunger problem at all and has a higher life expectancy than the US.
Lumping Cuba and North Korea together is silly & misguided.
That is plainly false. There are lots of cheating in how they count that, for example, if a kid is going to have any kind of problem, they suggest and try to abort it and it does not appear in the count, to give you just one single example about how they count life expectation. There is lots more that is only make up, such as the health care myth and others.
They do have lots of doctors they send abroad and the regime gets 70% of their income. When you land abroad, if you work like that, they take away your passport so that you cannot escape. They do campaigns to donate blood and they sell that blood (over 21 million dollars in sales for blood that was supposed to be, most of it, an altruist action by cuban people in one year). They are literally treated as slaves.
Did you see what happened last July? There were riots in the streets. They did not have even medicines or food and they (the regime and its propaganda) started to talk about the embargo (incorrectly called blockage) as the problem, when the problem is that those people in that odious regime do not let even the food or medicines go through without taking a part.
I mean, they take advantage of the anguish of relatives that are outside and they smash them. After that I saw president Diaz Canel promoting violence against people for the protests from his very own words, not a translation or similar (I can speak spanish).
The first "manipulation" identified would not impact Cuba's position as 1st in life expectancy in Latin America, as they concede in their article.
It is because if you cannot take care of a kid with some kind of problem and dies young, it lowers the life expectancy. So they encourage abortion and remove it from the count.
They have basically the same system: more repression and strictness in North Korea. But same base: corruption, repression, intervention and treating their citizens as animals with no dignity.