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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Compared to the US. While not uncontested (they are accused of falsifying data), cuba posts better infant mortality rates.

A lot of the medical issues in Cuba aren't related to the healthcare system but rather to trade embargos. It's a small miracle they do as well as they do given the constraints of being an island nation.

The reason for their success on a shoestring budget is administrative competence. They have a large number of clinics (rather than big hospital complexes) and education in medicine starts at those clinics. Future doctors work and are educated in medicine moving up into specialties. It's a little like making everyone that wants to practice medicine start as a orderly in a family medicine clinic.

IMO, this is superior to the US system of requiring several years of schooling before ever interacting with patients. And if you know an old nurse, you'll know they often do know a lot more than new doctors.

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This amidst an unrelenting united states “embargo” - in another world this embargo would be called the crime against humanity that it is.

I often think of this Logic article on Cuban information retrieval design. “ Informatics of the Oppressed”, by Rodrigo Ochigame https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/

I don't think you understand what an embargo is. The USA isn't blockading Cuba; they're free to trade with other countries like Venezuela or whatever. International trade requires the consent of both parties, and there's no moral or legal obligation to trade with a hostile foreign power (or allow our financial systems to be used to facilitate such trade).

The embargo would likely end soon if the Cuban government takes basic, simple steps like introducing open multiparty democracy, free market capitalism, and freedom for political prisoners. These steps would obviously benefit all Cubans so there's no possible reason to delay making those changes regardless of their impact on international trade.

The US enforces the embargo by cutting trade with any country doing trade with Cuba. It's not just a simple embargo between the US and Cuba, it's one that forces a country/company to make the decision "trade with Cuba or trade with the US".

Yes, exactly. Countries are free to make that choice. They can't have their cake and eat it, too.

> The US isn't blockading Cuba

That's what you said, but it is a just a coy semantic game by any real interpretation. The US took extra measures and went out of there way to strong arm any potential trade partners.

No sane or responsible nation would give up trade with the US and major parts of it's hemisphere of influence (Europe, Japan, Korea, etc) to access an island with nothing to offer in an inconvenient place.

The US, out of spite, demolished the Cuban economy and then spent decades beating the corpse for good measure long after the fight was over or justified.

Last I checked, they basically only got access to meaningful trade from Venezuela and China for a few decades, right?

The Cubans demolished their own economy. That's what Communists always do. Their problems are 100% self inflicted. They could end the embargo tomorrow if they take the necessary measures.

And the US just used their spies to assist in the overthrow of a few dozen (often democratic) countries in the 20th century because it was funny.

We would never use our economic or military might to sabotage competing nations or ideologies and any suffering in the world that looks like a direct result of those policies is simply the result of communism. It was totally a fair playing field.

Operation Cyclone wasn't real. The mujahideen aren't real. Don't look at the CIA behind the curtain.

While we're at it, do you want to really go all in and explain to me how McCarthyism also wasn't real? All those people just believed in an ideology that naturally results in their imprisonment, the US government would never silence anyone for their beliefs or anything.

This is actually nonsense, and it's silly that so many people repeat it as a justification of the corrupt, repressive Cuban regime when it's so easy to refute. The U.S. sanctions apply mainly to US companies and entities, and while they can sometimes be applied to companies in other countries, it's rare, and even more so for other countries as a whole. I know for a fact that many major countries regularly trade with Cuba. Are you going to now say that Canada has been cut off from U.S. trade because it also trades with Cuba? That's news to me. (Trump's idiotic tariff war notwithstanding since it's from a separate cause)

The state of the embargo has changed with the administrations.

Clinton relaxed it in 2000. Bush did nothing with it, Obama further relaxed it in 2014 and 2015, Trump reversed some of those relaxations in 2017, in 2021 Biden restored the state designation as a terrorist state.

During the height of the embargo, it absolutely was the case that the US applied maximum pressure and soft power in keeping countries from trading with Cuba. That was even part of the point of USAID "do what we tell you, or we'll stop these aid shipments" (not specifically for Cuba, but more broadly).

You know of companies personally trading there because the nature of the embargo has changed over the last 25 years. I'm old enough that I remember the pre 2000 relationship with Cuba. Admittedly, that probably makes me think the state is more harsh than it currently is. Old age does weird things to how you perceive things.

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