Los niños son la esperanza del mundo

Cuba's much touted free health care system is starting to be exposed as the propaganda myth that it is.

It's nothing against he doctors. Cuban doctors seem to be excellent. But that's a tradition that existed well before the "revolution".

The biggest blow to the health care system came when Cuban doctors had to bring in a Spanish doctor to save Fidel's life.

Today The Miami Herald, under new management, tackles Cuba's infant mortality rate.

Ironically, the article comes out on the birthday of the Apostle, who said:

"Los niños son la esperanza del mundo"

Infant mortality rate in Cuba raises eyebrows

Excerpts:

The one health statistic Cuba gives the most publicity to -- and appears to spend the most resources on -- is its infant mortality rate.

On Jan. 3, the official Communist Party newspaper Gramna boasted the country had reduced its infant mortality rate in 2006 to 5.3 per 1,000 live births, considerably below the U.S. rate of 6.0, from 2004, and leading all of Latin America.

Quote from a Cuban Dissident Physician!:

Darsi Ferrer, a dissident physician in Havana, doesn't doubt the Granma report. ''That number is indeed low,'' he told The Miami Herald by telephone. ''That program takes a large amount of resources'' out of the system. ``They don't care about 1- to 5-year-olds.''

''If there was any malformation in the fetus, they would interrupt the pregnancy,'' said Monzón, now a lab technician at Mercy Hospital in Miami. A heart murmur or other serious problems required an abortion. This was ''automatic,'' he said. If the mother objected, a team from the hospital would persuade her an abortion was necessary.

Other sources also say abortion is a tool used to keep infant mortality low, including Andy Gomez at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a retired University of Pittsburgh economics professor who has spent decades studying Cuba.

Recent Cuba abortion data is not available, but a study by the Pan American Health Organization from 1998 states Cuba had 70 abortions per 100 deliveries in 1992 and 59.4 in 1996, far higher than the 34 to 38 abortions per 100 live births reported during that time in the United States.

Rest of the Article Here