Word: cuba
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...Besides Cuba’s questionable success in reducing infant mortality, health care in other respects is decidedly lacking. Cubans are indeed granted free diagnosis, but they lack free care. Cuba lacks the resources to treat its patients, who are expected to supply their own pillows and water during hospital visits. These hospitals are in decaying condition, a fact made more appalling by its contrast to the exemplary hospitals which only foreigners have access...
...Castro’s regime has also relished highlighting the fact that Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the United States, yet this too must be qualified. Although literacy was expanded to areas of the country where education had been lacking, the overall quality of education under Castro suffered due to its emphasis on indoctrination. A student is not given the opportunity to explore varied educational interests. Students are taught Marx, but not Smith; Lenin, but not Locke; Guevara, but not Jefferson. Education in Cuba is merely another instrument for the government to intrude into everyday life, manage opinions...
...truly free educational system should operate unconditionally. But in Cuba, your education comes at a severe price: forced labor in escuelas del campo (countryside schools), to which junior high students are sent for work ranging from picking tomatoes to cutting sugar cane. Entrance into Cuba’s universities is conditional on involvement with the Communist Party. Cuban students cannot express dissenting opinions for fear of being identified as “counter-revolutionaries,” effectively precluding them from pursuing professional careers...
...qualify the repressive nature of the regime with praise of those supposed advances in medicine and education is unacceptable. Anything that falls short of a free society leaves all other considerations insignificant. It is hard to imagine that 90 miles from our shore, freedoms are alienable. In Cuba, the choice to dissent from the government has dire ramifications. Citizens are imprisoned for merely voicing an opinion. Prisoners of conscience are systematically tortured and often executed for not conforming to the constraints of the totalitarian state—just some of many blatant violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...With great hope, we look forward to the day when Cuba can promise liberty to all its citizens. To a day when we could publish a critical article of this nature without having to fear the retribution of the government. Castro’s resignation is symbolic and significant in its own context, but unfortunately, it won’t mark the start of a new era in Cuban history...