Via Reason:
Justin Trudeau sure as heck stepped in it, hasn’t he? Of course, the Canadian prime minister was not alone in praising Fidel Castro’s “significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” Here is a compilation of the usual suspects (CNN, MSNBC, NBC, etc.) fawning over the dead dictator’s “legacy.” And, since fish stinks from the head down, let’s not forget President Obama’s lionization of the Castro brothers’ “accomplishments” when he visited Havana earlier this year.
Sure, our 44th president acknowledged that Cubans are pathetically poor and lack basic human rights, but then he took the sting out of his condemnation of the Cuban dictatorship by saying that the Cuban government “should be congratulated” for giving each child basic education and every person access to healthcare. I wonder if our president would perform a similar rhetorical summersault when talking about General Augusto Pinochet, whose economic policies have turned the once backward Chile into Latin America’s richest country in one generation.
Looking on the bright side, at least nobody has claimed that Cuban education and healthcare are of world-beating quality. That Cubans should be literate is to be expected. All communist dictatorships taught their people how to read and then they gave them all the reading material that the government propaganda ministries have managed to print.
When it comes to healthcare, let’s get a few things straight. All socialist regimes have had a two tier healthcare system—one for the senior communist party members (with excellent and motivated doctors, and western drugs and medical equipment) and one for the hoi polloi(with apathetic medical staff and shortages of, well, everything). I know this because I grew up under socialism and spoke to Cubans, whose stories are very similar to my own.
And to drive my point about healthcare and socialism home, here is a New York Times story about Venezuela’s socialist healthcare entitled, “Dying infants and no medicine: inside Venezuela’s failing hospitals.”
