Behind Cuba’s Covid Uprising
By Mary O’Grady, 7/11/21, Wall St. Journal

Cubans poured into the streets Sunday to protest the govt’s
handling of the Covid crisis. As the virus races across Cuba,

independent lawyers, medical pro's & civil-society groups
on the island have begged Havana to allow int'l humanitarian
aid to reach people directly. The regime refuses. Now the
crisis is near cataclysmic proportions.

Havana wants the world to believe that Cuban hardship in
healthcare is caused by the U.S. embargo. But food & meds
are exempt from the embargo. As Julie Chung, now acting
asst sec'y of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, tweeted
in April 2020, the U.S. “routinely authorizes the export of

humanitarian goods, AG products, medicine, & med equipment
to support the Cuban people.” Chung further noted that in 2019 the U.S.
exported millions of dollars of medical goods to Cuba.

Cuba’s real problem is that it’s broke. And while all poor
countries in the region have struggled to serve the public
during Covid-19, only Cuba has made things worse by trying
to use the pandemic as a way to earn hard currency for the
ruling elite and boost its legitimacy around the world.

Shortages of meds for treatable illnesses in Cuba are
routine. The contagious mite infestation of the skin known
as scabies, for example, can be remedied with antibiotics &
topical meds like permethrin. Yet Cuban public-health
officials have been helpless to stop it from spreading
across the island.

“It’s horrible & exasperating to see your children sick, &
not be able to do anything because there are no meds,” a
mother in the city of Mayarí told the newspaper Diario de
Cuba in Feb. “I went to the hospital & there’s nothing to
cure it either. It’s a tragedy.”

Cuba promotes itself as world-class healthcare powerhouse.
But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital &
outpatient network can't even tend to run-of-the-mill
illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better
in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is
spreading, many medical pro's have fled, & basic needs in hospitals,
like reliable running water, are no longer met.

On July 6, Diario de Cuba quoted a Facebook post by an
ER nurse at the Faustino Pérez Provincial Hosp, in the
capital city of the province of Matanzas: “There are no beds
or stretchers, a hospital without water for over 6 hours
in two periods of the day.”

The same story quoted a healthcare pro at Héroes del
Moncada Polyclinic in the city of Cárdenas describing on
Facebook the plight of the sick: They “do not receive
medical attention when they need it most or they must wait
in a deteriorated state of health in long lines, & the
reason is that there is not enough health personnel to
cover all the fronts.”

Cuba’s claim that it graduates thousands of qualified
doctors & nurses every year is suspect. Yet even if the
numbers are reliable, Havana’s practice of human trafficking
robs the nation of available medical pro's.

The dictatorship claims it sends tens of thousands of health-
care workers around the globe out of altruism. But the
medical missions are a money-making operation. Countries
pay Havana for the workers in dollars or euros & it gives
only a fraction of that income to the in-country Cuban.
The rest it pockets.

In the State Dept’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report,
issued last month, Cuba gets a failing grade. The report
described “a govt policy or govt pattern to profit from
labor export programs with strong indications of forced
labor, particularly its foreign medical missions program.”
The report went on to say that in the past year Cuba
“capitalized on the pandemic by increasing the number &
size of med missions & refused to improve the program’s
transparency or address labor violations & trafficking
crimes despite persistent allegations from observers,
former participants, & foreign govts” of Cuban abuses.

This mistreatment includes confiscating documents &
salaries & threatening workers & their families if they
try to flee their assignments.

The regime’s medical-export survival strategy also creates
a shortage of meds. Cuba produces pharma products but
exports them for profit rather than making what is needed
available to the population.

Acc. to the Cárdenas medical worker’s Facebook post, “the
reality is that there are no drugs to treat the different
symptoms that Covid positive patients present.”

Yet Cuba is so eager to be recognized as a biotech pioneer
that it is administering the homemade vaccine Abdala to
Cubans & Venezuelans before it has cleared clinical trials
or peer review & without informed consent. A June 25
bulletin from Venezuela’s National Academy of Medicine
warned about the “experimental” nature of the product without “proven
efficacy.”

Cuba wants the Biden admin to ease U.S. restrictions on
things like travel to the island & remittances. Count on
the regime to use the population’s agony as a negotiating tool.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-cubas-covid-uprising-11626042703