Should the Media Have Extolled Castro's Program?

I well remember that while the press was denigrating almost everthing American they were extolling Castro for his altruism.  So what happened with Castro's great program?  This article appeared in Investor's Business Daily and explains that it was just like every other Castro program.  Just ask the Cubans.

Doctors Flee South America Sick Man

Latin America: As rumors fly about Fidel Castro's demise, truths about his regime's failures slip out. His vaunted overseas "free" medical program for the poor, once a propaganda coup, is falling apart.

In Bolivia, at least 30 Cuban doctors out of 719 defected to freedom, according to Bolivian media.

In Venezuela, 4,000 Cuban doctors out of 15,000 also fled the country, Union Radio reported.

These Cuban doctors were at the forefront of Castro's last-ditch effort to rejuvenate his communist dictatorship. Castro cooked up the Venezuelan "Barrio Adentro" plan just three years ago with Hugo Chavez to obscure his record of dispatching brutal military mercenaries and guerrillas abroad to seize power and influence.

For Chavez, the new Cuban medical missions worked well as political pork to buy votes in his 2004 Venezuelan recall referendum.

Emptying Cuba's hospitals and clinics, Castro sent these doctors to the slums of Caracas and elsewhere, leaving Cubans themselves without doctors. Havana's public hospitals, outside the tourist zones, are bereft of any medical care as doctors disappear abroad.

For Castro, his perfect plan was remarkably cheap. Although details are hardly transparent, it's known that the scheme cost Cuba only a few million dollars. Cuban medics got $100 a month and another $100 for family members back home to ensure their return.

But Cuba's doctors didn't play according to the script. Over in Caracas, some who had passports simply walked out, got on planes and sought to practice medicine in the free world. Others, whose passports were under the lock and key of their Communist Party minders, sought asylum at U.S. embassies, and got it.

Other doctors made contact with networks of Caracas' 40,000 Cuban exiles who'd fled Castro in earlier waves and quietly made their way to asylum and safety elsewhere.

It's no surprise why they did it. Defecting doctors say they are essentially there for a political purpose rather than to practice medicine. Their "free" medical care amounts to industrial "dumping," putting real doctors out of business in places such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Central America, all of which have seen medical-personnel strikes over these "free" and often less-trained Cuban doctors.

In Caracas, the Cuban physicians live in unsafe conditions, with Castro and Chavez showing little regard for their well-being. They've been housed in medical kiosks in visible slum areas to get down there with "the people." For them, that meant being awakened at night by blasts and flashes from gunfire in the gang violence plaguing the area. These doctors had no freedom to practice medicine in personal safety.

These Cubans also marveled at the prospect of buying actual soap and food in freer if more anarchic Caracas with their meager salaries, a chance they rarely had in Havana.

And one by one, they quietly began leaving. Now the extent of it's known.

In western Caracas, near the Caricuao subway station, a fresh-constructed red-brick octagonal medical kiosk, the visible symbol of Castro's Cuban doctor operation, is boarded up and encircled with razor wire. That kiosk was installed supposedly to provide 24-hour medical service to poor areas. But the doctors are gone.

And along the old Caracas/La Guaira highway, three more of the distinctive Cuban brick compounds, one after another, also were recently seen boarded up.

Meanwhile, in the truly poor Caracas slums, known as ranchos, where cardboard boxes and corrugated steel serve as housing, no Cuban doctor kiosks are there at all.

It goes to show that Castro-care is nothing but a myth.

What's disgusting is how quickly the media bought into it, giving glowing press and extolling Castro's supposed altruism. Castro knew this would happen and even tried to shove his doctors onto the U.S. during the Hurricane Katrina debacle, pleased with his good publicity after the U.S. turned him down.

After all, in the logic of the left, Castro's medical missionaries showed the "humanity" of socialist medicine over the profit-driven capitalist kind. Renouncing profit would bring abundant medical care for all, or so the reasoning goes.

But this happens only if there really is medical care that's fairly valued. Under the current fiasco for Castro, there is now evidence that "free" medical care is as much in shortage in Caracas as it is in Havana.

Now that the Cubans are defecting, Chavez will have considerable trouble persuading the poor that a vote for him in December will mean more abundant political spoils.

Farther north, Castro seems to be even more worried. His National Assembly speaker, Ricardo Alarcon, Thursday said that President Bush's priority in Cuba's coming transition was to "sabotage" Castro's overseas medical program.

It's likely he was thinking of Cuba's missing doctors.

If so, these defections may signal more than just Castro's fear of being discredited — they might just bring those communist regimes down.