While US media conglomerates like Time and Fox have been obsessing for months about whether or not 80-year old Fidel Castro is finally about to meet El Fabricante, Cuba has been busy setting health records -- helping its 11.4 million citizens achieve lower mortality and longer lives than almost anywhere else in the developing world.
Now that a leading Madrid surgeon has made it clear -- contrary to USG agitprop -- that Fidel is not suffering from terminal cancer, and, indeed, is recovering well from last summer's stomach operation, perhaps this other Cuban health story will finally receive the attention that it deserves.
Just this month Cuba announced that its infant mortality rate has reached the First World average of just 5.3 per thousand -- on a par with the latest rates for the UK, Canada and New Zealand, even lower than the 6.7 US average, and less than half the 14.1 average rate for all African-Americans in the US.
LATIN AMERICA'S HIDDEN HOLOCAUST
Even more to the point, Cuba's infant mortality rate is also the lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean, and indeed, the lowest for any developing country in the world.
The
corollary is
another important story. This is the fact that while
Fidel's tiny, isolated, centrally-planned, highly-inefficient,
antediluvian island
economy has managed to set record after record on public health,
education, poverty reduction, and gender equality since the 1970s, the "non-revolutionary" rest of Latin America has lagged far behind. Over time, the cumulative impact has been huge.
For example, as we'll see below, if other Latin American and Caribbean countries had simply kept pace with Cuba's percentage improvements in infant mortality from the 1960s to 2005, an additional 6.4 million infants -- an average of 184,000 per year for the region as a whole -- would have survived the first year of childbirth.
In effect, all these "missing children" amount to nothing less than a continuing hidden holocaust -- attributable at least in part to the pro-elite development paths that most of these countries have pursued.
Many of those critics on the Right who like to rail against the deficiencies of Castro's regime -- its admitted lack of US-style national elections and market freedoms, its shortage of big fancy cars and other consumer goods -- also profess to be profoundly concerned about human rights, the welfare of Elian Gonzalez, "the rights of the unborn," and so forth.
Perhaps they will now bring themselves to admit that at leas
t in one respect, Fidel's Revolution is actually a role model -- and that naked capitalist development also has very high costs.
This goes a long way to explain why, far from being the pariah that USG has tried to make him, Fidel is today treated with greater respect and admiration throughout Latin America than ever before --
certainly in comparison with former US-backed right-wing thugs like
Pinochet, Rios Montt, Banzer, Fujimori, and the Argentine and Brazilian
juntas.
Consistent with this, on October 28, 2006, the UN General Assembly voted for the 13th year in a row to condemn the US embargo on Cuba.
Every Latin American and Caribbean country voted to support the
resolution, joining 179 countries that did so. Only four countries
voted against it -- the US, Israel, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.
In any case, whatever the quality of life in Cuba for adults today, the fact is that if you are an unborn infant of average means who somehow gets to decide where in the entire developing world to be born, there's no contest.
(For all the gory statistical details, read on below):
