From the earliest days of the revolution, efforts to legitimize the Marxist Leninist project centered on free and universal healthcare and education. Real and/or reported achievements, aided by a tight control and manipulation of statistics, together with vigorous propaganda efforts worldwide have created an exceptionally favorable international opinion of Cuba’s universal health and education systems. […]

Notes1,2 Cuba has produced an interesting case of “exceptionalism” because this socialist and communist regime has been able to maintain power for more than fifty years merely ninety miles away from the home of democracy— the United States (Hoffman and Whitehead 2006, 5). This poses a dilemma because despite all the external pressures that have […]

For quite some time the Cuban economy has been facing a number of economic problems. There has been minimal recovery from the near 80% collapse in the population’s real income levels since the suspension of the subsidies provided by the Soviet Union in 1989; in fact, the official wage rate remains at about 25% of […]

Notes1 Unlike the ubiquitous commercial advertisements found in the United States, the visual landscape in Cuba contains thousands of billboards, posters, and murals that deliver political and social messages to the public. These range from celebrating diplomatic collaboration with ally nations, to decrying Cuban antiterrorist agents held prisoner abroad, to eradicating the mosquitoes that carry […]

Notes1 The World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948 defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”2 Henry Sigerist, in his monumental work on the history of medicine, could never grasp the obscure ideological goal of Soviet totalitarian universal primary health care, with […]