Cuban infant mortality rates have risen dramatically since communist takeover

Cuban infant mortality rates have risen dramatically since communist takeover

Cuban author and historian Humberto Fontova says the mainstream media continues to extol the virtues of Cuba's free healthcare system as something that should be implemented in the United States. However, he warns that the quality of healthcare in that country has declined sharply since Fidel Castro came to power.

Fontova, an expert on Castro's communist regime, is the son of one of the Cuban dictator's political prisoners who escaped the island nation in 1961. The Cuban-born author has recently published a book titled Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him (Sentinel, 2007).

According to Fontova, healthcare is free in Cuba because that nation's hospitals are dirty, its pharmacies are empty, and its medical experts are few and far between. But it has not always been that way, he asserts.

"In 1958, which is to say, the year before the revolution, Cuba had the 13th lowest infant-mortality rate -- not in the hemisphere [but] in the world," the historian says. "Right now, and this is if you believe a Stalinist regime's figures, it is 34th from the top with regards to infant mortality," he notes, "which is to say, after decades of massacres and incarceration, Cuban healthcare has actually worsened relative to the rest of the world."

However, Fontova has doubts about whether Cuba's ranking of its infant mortality rate at 34th in the world can be trusted. That figure, he contends, is "a complete hoax, as is almost everything else that you hear about Cuba in the mainstream media."

In 1957, before the communist takeover, Cuba had more doctors and dentists as a percentage of population than the United States and the United Kingdom, Fontova notes. However, the author says his new book presents statistics that refute the idea that Cuba's free healthcare system, in its present condition, is anything that should be admired or imitated in the United States.