When you start from such a low base, there is enormous room for growth. The question is what can they export? Cigars? Medical personnel?
Cuba actually has an incredible socialized medicine healthcare system, and the US embargo specifically carves out an exception for cancer pharmaceuticals developed and manufactured there. Its not that far fetched that you would see medical tourism take off from Florida with its vast retiree population.
If I were in the travel business in Florida, I'd start advertising now to get your name out there, and fly to Havana to have a conversation with Raúl Castro about how much yearly revenue you could be bringing in (all in USD I might add). About $39 billion/year is spent in Florida on Medicare; taking only a small piece of that is an incredible proposition for a country the size of Cuba.
"Despite a 50-year trade embargo by the United States and a post-Soviet collapse in international support, the impoverished nation has developed a world-class health care system. Average life expectancy is 77.5 years, compared to 78.1 years in the United States, and infant and child mortality rates match or beat our own. There’s one doctor for every 170 people, more than twice the per-capita U.S. average.
Not everything is perfect in Cuba. There are shortages of medicines, and the best care is reserved for elites. But it’s still a powerful feat. “In Cuba, a little over $300 per person is spent on health care each year. In the U.S., we’re spending over $7,000 per person,” said Drain, co-author of Caring for the World and an essay published April 29 in Science. “They’re able to achieve great health outcomes on a modest budget.”"
Nice healthcare system!
http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/2014/03/26/medical-ban...
“In 2013 over 20% of American adults are struggling to pay their medical bills, and three in five bankruptcies will be due to medical bills. While we are quick to blame debt on poor savings and bad spending habits, our study emphasizes the burden of health costs causing widespread indebtedness. Medical bills can completely overwhelm a family when illness strikes,” says Christina LaMontagne, VP of Health at NerdWallet. “Furthermore, 25 million people hesitate to take their medications in order to control their medical costs. Unfortunately this can lead to even worse financial outcomes as preventative treatments are not rendered and patients end up using expensive ambulance and ER care as their health worsens.”
Then I also grew up in Soviet Union, where supposedly great healthcare was developed. And I can tell you they had a horrible health care like they have it in Cuba today.
If Cuban health care is so great, where is their great health research and studies? When did they publish the last time in Lancet on in NEJM? Where is that?
Cuba invests heavily in cancer research.
"Even in times of economic hardship, the Cuban Government has remained constant in its political and financial support for biotechnology. In the last 20 years it invested around one billion US dollars in research and development. Today, the Cuban biotech industry holds around 1200 international patents and markets pharmaceutical products and vaccines in more than 50 countries. Exports are soaring and generate yearly revenues of several hundred million dollars."
http://www.who.int/features/2013/cuba_biotechnology/en/ http://investmentwatchblog.com/cuba-develops-anti-cancer-tre...
That's because you're an anesthesiologist, and you see the acute cases which have already been admitted to the hospital. Poor people don't receive comparable long-term care. They don't receive comparable followup care after procedures. They can't afford lifesaving medication, they can't afford physical therapy, and they can't afford psychiatric care. They're denied for transplants, and many surgeons won't accept them as patients because their recovery stats are so much lower due to the aforementioned lack of followup.
All of this, without even mentioning the increasing number of specialty surgeons that operate on a cash-only basis, or the poor who don't go to the doctor simply because they cannot afford to. There's no comparison between the care that the rich and poor receive in this country, except possibly once they're unconscious in the OR.
I have worked in one of the top medical schools in the US, with world-class researchers, and know that there is very little there that is directly applicable to a population of rural farmers and impoverished city dwellers.
Elites, in other words.
The country is surprisingly politically free for a tiny nation facing an existential threat from a hostile super power that has invaded, attempted to assassinate it's leader, and funded militants dead set on violent revolution for decades.
American leadership immediately resorted to torture and illegal domestic surveillance when faced with the loss of two skyscrapers and 3,000 lives from an enemy that is more like an annoying gnat than an existential threat.
Cuba is a success story for socialism, and that is why US policy has sought to punish it, and to make it fail. The US did not want a successful socialist nation in it's sphere of influence, it gives the other nations subject to the Monroe doctrine ideas.
I don't think your argument is supported by any of the facts.[1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba#Contempora...
How come nobody hit the ceiling when we didn't close our embassy with China today?
Cuba is third world poor. A country where the average person earns $300 to $500 per month, is a slave pen. State sponsored slavery is the only way you can repress people to such an extreme extent as to hold their standard of living that low for 50 years.
Given there has never been an economically successful Socialist nation in world history, it makes perfect sense that Cuba would be a failure just like all the rest.
Honestly, I'm not into communism and am very surprised that their figures are as good as they are. It's dumbfounding.'
I guess it's more a statement of how hard it is to come up from the bottom whatever your system is. Russia and China both showed great results in their first couple 5-year plans before communism petered out and didn't deliver further gains.
The mortality rates for children under five in 2007 were as follows (World Bank): Cuba, 6.5; Latin America and Caribbean, 26.37; United States, 7.60;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Cuba#Comparison_...
You are right, Cuba is third world poor and they still beat their capitalist neighbors and even the wealthy and powerful US in life expectancy and infant mortality.
Cuba does so much with so little because of the radical idea that we are all in this together. Cuba spends $300 per citizen on health care, the US spends $7000. I spent $5000 personally just this year on health care and I'm young and healthy.
Those in capitalist countries are getting fleeced, and Cuba shows us that. If Cuban socialism didn't exist I couldn't point out these facts, and that is why Cuban socialism was such a threat and why the US has acted so insecure towards the tiny island's revolution.
I don't want the US to adopt the Cuban system, I just believe we had no right to violate their sovereignty, and having different political systems out there lets us have a sort of A/B test for politics. I don't believe a global political and economic monoculture is healthy.
As an American I wouldn't want to trade places at birth with a Cuban, but if I had the choice between being born to asset-less parents in Jamaica or asset-less parents in Cuba, I know I would be healthier, more materially secure and far safer from violent crime in Cuba. I also would have a much greater chance of not dying during my birth.
With that type of success who needs failure.
Despite the fact that I spend much of my working life writing "if" statements, I am going to ignore everything after the sixth word of this sentence and express disbelief at how you can claim that Cubans are politically free.
if cubaFree
> True
What I meant:
Considering how much political freedom was jettisoned by the US after 9/11, I am amazed that Cuba sits as close to the free side of the freedom spectrum as it does considering its been under existential threat for five decades.
Cuba is not a completely free and open society, and I don't claim to be able to pinpoint with certainty where on the freedom spectrum it sits exactly. I have never been there, as a US citizen I have not been free to travel there.
We are not free to go see for ourselves, we just echo the dominant ideology.
From the reading I have done I know that Cuba is more free than I was led to believe in school. It is not an Orwellian state.
I cite a comment from this thread on the topic:
> When I was there I was struck by people saying how hard it was and how they had to get by on about US$2 a week - this was a while back now.
Cubans are free to complain, I've heard it's a national past time.
They are free to engage in politics within socialism.
They are not free to oppose socialism and work to end it.
Americans have never been free to undermine capitalism. Anarchist/Marxist revolutionaries in the US have always been monitored, harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed. See the history of the FBI, the Palmer raids, the Wobblies, Joe McCarthy, the black panthers, SDS, etc...
The US has given the Cuban government justification to curtail rights. This justification would not exist if the US would have respected Cuban sovereignty and not tried to murder it's leader, invade and destabilize.
How do you tell the difference between a sincere citizen activist and a foreign spy when the most powerful empire the world has known is actively trying to sabotage your government?
In the US in the years after 9/11 we heard a dire meme repeated over and over that went something like "If we get hit again it will be martial law" and we mostly accepted that as inevitable.
I find the finger pointing at Cuba to be unfair and lacking historical context.