Cuba is Contradictory

During the early part of our Cuba visit, we heard about and noticed benefits that the Cuban government provides all its people. Cuban health care has a reputation for being both effective and low-cost. Schools we cycled past appeared to be both orderly and dynamic. And the country passes my informal “curb test”: to me, one marker of development in a country is whether or not it spends its resources to add curbs to the streets in populated areas.

Somebody looked up Cuba’s rank on the Human Development Index, which considers numbers related to longevity, health, living standards, and access to knowledge. The country falls in the top 40% (Myanmar, by contrast, has a rank almost exactly double that of Cuba, placing it in the bottom quarter of countries on this scale.) Birth rates here are lower than in most countries with similar resources, in part because people expect all of their children to live. Noticeably absent, at least compared to what I’m used to seeing in Southeast Asia, are the logos of international NGOs and the UN. Perhaps the help here is homegrown?

Yet lately we are coming to understanding that countless products and services taken for granted by much of the world aren't available here. The cars and buses we see come only from a bygone American era, or from Eastern bloc assembly lines. (This afternoon a taxi's door handle came off as I pulled on it.) Cement is scarce, leading to difficult choices about what to renovate and what to abandon. Power cuts are frequent, especially during the summer. U.S.-led sanctions likely explain a great deal of what’s missing. 

One guy in our group, unfortunately, had occasion to test out the health system. Riding his bike perhaps a bit too fast, he misjudged a rural road’s curve and went into the ditch. In the next town, which was tiny, the government clinic docs very capably cleaned up his battered face and set his broken thumb. But when they sent him on to the country’s fifth-largest city for x-rays at the regional hospital, we found that it lacked fairly basic equipment. The radiologist had to step outdoors and hold up the film toward the sun rather than use a light box to read the image. In Cuba, apparently, it’s best to be injured during daylight hours.

Occasionally we came across large crowds that we couldn't explain. Asking around, we learned that a free internet signal was nearby. The chance to access the web for free attracts big throngs, often in town plazas. Paying for internet service can cost as much in one hour as about two weeks of a typical government salary... and about three-quarters of the population works for the government.