One of the great cliches about Cuba is that despite all its human rights and other abuses it sure has a fine free health service which the rest of us should admire.

Really? 

One of the ways in which any good health service keeps effective surely must be ready access to information and new ideas on the part of doctors, other health staff and patients alike. Cuba fails here too.

More importantly, isn’t the very claim that Cuba has a great health service in fact insulting to Cubans?

When we talk about Finland or Singapore or Kuwait or Botswana or Ukraine or even Venezuela we do not seek to explain away their various problems (such as they may be) by saying that they have a fine ‘free’ health service. We take for granted that all those societies have made some sort of coherent effort to look after their own health, including by allocating resources accordingly.  As indeed they have.  

The point is that these and most other countries manage to walk and chew gum and do plenty of other things well at the same time. In good part because the inherent ability of their people is enhanced by the fact that they can travel abroad, enjoy modern media, cruise the Internet and generally take part in modern life global processes as they see fit.

Their societies breathe. Cuba denies its people all those things. Cuba wheezes.

A credible health service anywhere needs a strong supply of up-to-date equipment and drugs and techniques. If a country as poor and corrupt as Cuba does indeed scratch together achievements in this policy area, it can be happening only at the expense of forcibly stopping other sectors developing at a natural pace. Which explains why much of Cuba is falling to pieces.

But is not it all the USA’s fault – that horrid embargo? Piffle.

Personally I have never liked that embargo. Better to flood the place with influence and contact, not make it more difficult; the embargo has given the Cuban regime an excuse not to reform.

But in any case, if at any time in the past 40 years Castro had decided to change course and bring in free and fair UN-supervised elections with a commitment to have further elections every four/five years thereafter, the embargo would have gone and Cuba could and would have developed in a much more balanced way.

It can happen tomorrow. Does anyone think that Cubans would rise up en masse against such a move to insist on the status quo?  

As it is, the new Cuban leader is … the brother of Fidel Castro. Elected ‘behind closed doors’ by an ‘assembly, whose members are elected from a list fixed by the authorities’.

Gosh, and he was elected unanimously. And he even won a standing ovation. What a capital and popular leader he must be there. 

What is it about people who pipe up noisily in support of Cuba’s socialist triumphs which stops them from cringing in embarrassment at this ludicrous spectacle?

Let’s stop insulting Cubans by feting their vast and heroic achievements in some areas, when we take such successes for granted. 

When we stop patronising Cubans they’ll know that they are at last a free, normal country.