In Antwort auf:

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Socialized Medicine in Cuba (2002) – Part I: A Poor State of Health!
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D. Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2002

Those who yearn for a more "egalitarian" and "equitable" system of
medical care "like the one in Cuba" are not familiar with the
extraordinary saga of Cuban physician Dr. Dessy Mendoza Rivero. But
they should be! "¡Dengue! – La Epidemia Secreta de Fidel Castro," the
title of his book, is one they should read. But they won't!

For one thing, most of the admirers of Cuba's Revolution and its
socialized system of medical care don't speak or read Spanish and only
know the system from afar – either looking down from above in the
ivory towers of academia, where Marxism is still in vogue, or learned
from the sound bites of liberal journalists and news anchormen, who
still glorify Fidel Castro and his socialist Revolution.

Written with a feminist writer and cultural critic, Ileana Fuentes,
and published by the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C.,
"¡Dengue!" is a must-read. We learn from Dr. Mendoza that Cuba's
"free" socialized system of medical care is in shambles, a veritable
disaster, a disgraceful tragic regression from the once advanced
medical care system of the 1950s in the pre-Castro years.

The Arrest of a Medical Dissident

The book begins with Dr. Mendoza's dramatic arrest at his home in his
native city of Santiago de Cuba, the country's second-largest city,
located on the easternmost portion of the island and home of the
Sierra Maestra mountains.

Dr. Mendoza's crime was that of investigating, revealing and forcing
the communist dictatorship to admit the existence of a raging epidemic
of dengue fever in the spring and summer of 1997. In fact, Dr. Mendoza
was on the telephone with a Miami radio station communicating the
details of the epidemic to the outside world when the Cuban State
Security political police closed in:

"There are approximately 13 dead, 2,500 hospitalized patients and
30,000 people afflicted!" Mendoza frantically declared, warning the
interlocutor on the other side of the telephone line that the
communication would be cut at any moment, as State Security had
surrounded the house and was knocking on the door.

The Secret Epidemic of Hemorrhagic Dengue Fever

The communist regime did not want to reveal to the world the existence
of the epidemic because it was a personal embarrassment to Fidel
Castro, who had previously declared that the mosquito responsible for
dengue, the Aedes aegypti, had been eradicated long before – by the
long arm of the Revolution!

More importantly, such a disclosure endangered the burgeoning Cuban
tourist industry, which at the time was in high gear preparing for the
Santiago Carnival, the Expo Caribe '97 celebration, the World Youth
and Students Festival, and "a marathon of cultural and propaganda
events planned for Santiago de Cuba that year."

Because the Cuban communist authorities in the public health system
kept the epidemic hush-hush, calling the disease "an unspecified
virus," people continued to medicate themselves with aspirin for the
prodromal (early flu-like) viral symptoms of the disease, tragically
worsening the hemorrhagic manifestations of the disease.

Aspirin, about the only medication available to ordinary Cubans for
any disease, aggravates bleeding by impairing the ability of platelets
to agglutinate and coagulate bleeding sites. Dr. Mendoza describes
some hapless patients who bled from every body orifice and suffocated
on their own blood because of the bleeding tendency of the disease,
worsened by the anti-platelet effects of aspirin.

And yet Dr. Gustavo Kouri, head of Cuba's Institute of Tropical
Medicine, violated Hippocrates' precepts of medical ethics when, in
the midst of the epidemic, under the direction of Fidel Castro and to
guarantee his own safety, cowardly certified that there was no dengue
epidemic and even falsified details about the disease to the media and
the public in a campaign of disinformation – for example, claiming
that the mosquito Aedes aegypti did not breed in dirty, stagnant water
or in marshes but rather in clean, potable water!

Be that as it may, Dr. Mendoza was arrested, separated from his wife,
Caridad Piñon (also a courageous, dissident physician), and their
small children, who, to make matters even more desperate for the
valiant physician, were ostracized by their neighbors. Dr. Mendoza was
then solemnly condemned to eight years in prison for the crime of
"disseminating enemy propaganda." And this, despite the fact that the
government less than a week later was forced to admit the existence of
the deadly epidemic.

But Dr. Mendoza had succeeded in getting the attention of the foreign
press, and Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of
conscience. He served 18 months in the horrible Boniato prison under
subhuman conditions before he was released in the wake of mounting
international pressure. Once free, Dr. Mendoza was forced into exile
by the communist regime.

Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., is Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Sentinel
(http://www.haciendapub.com) and author of "Vandals at the Gates of Medicine"
(1995); "Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine"
(1997); and "Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise" (2002).
All three books are available from http://www.haciendapub.com.

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