“Remember that here you stand in line for bread, but there you stand in line for work. Sooner or later here you get the bread, and jobs are guaranteed. But there?”
The “there” is the United States. That is a quote from an article by Mary Jo McConahay called “Sugar Cane Communism,” which was printed in the Jan. 12 Image magazine section of the San Francisco Examiner.
While the writer describes the hardships being faced by the Cuban people, she also is even-handed in showing the support of the Cubans for their country and its leader, Fidel Castro, and their willingness to sacrifice for their homeland.
A comparison between the Cuban people and their hardships and the working people of the United States would quickly reveal why the majority of Cubans are willing to sacrifice, while the working class and the poor of this country are angry and resentful.
Listen to a Cuban woman, Rosamaria, talk of her country. “I don’t know if I could survive capitalism.... I am afraid I will be marginalized in a non-socialist system,” she says. She deeply fears a world where competition is important, where there is a vast gap in the standard of living between rich and poor. She has never known such a gap.
Can you imagine any poor person in the United States who has never felt the gap between the rich and the poor? Even capitalist economists are “worried” about the growing number of “have-nots” on one side and the super-rich on the other.
McConahay continues in her article, “After 30 years of social revolution, there are no bums, no more gaps between the glittery rich and the miserable poor, no more desperate prostitution.”
She goes on to report on Cuba’s controversial AIDS policy. “Cuba’s AIDS policy is draconian and effective. Those infected with the virus live in one of the 11 sanitariums that are scattered across the island. From 200 cases in 1986, the number has risen to only 676, of which 54 have died.
“Despite cutbacks almost everywhere else, the state is maintaining its expenditure of $15,000 a year per patient—about five times the average yearly wage—at this sanitarium. It is a sprawling country estate that feels at first like a rural resort. Overhead are tropical fruit trees—orange, mango, avocado. Patients live individually or as couples in their own houses with televisions, kitchen appliances, and the tools of their trade.
“Patients at the sanitarium continue to receive the salary they earned on the outside. They can choose the kind of treatment they want or no treatment at all. Cuba produces its own Interferon. AZT is expensive because the U.S. embargo means the drug must be purchased from third countries at inflated prices, but it too is free to those who want it.”
Dr. Jorge Perez, the director of the sanitarium, allows three-day passes on weekends and sometimes leave during the week for those they deem “responsible.” Among the staff are medical personnel who are also residents because they are HIV-positive: five doctors, eight nurses, and four medical students. “This makes the level of trust very deep with other patients,” Perez says.
At the sanitarium patients get married, have relatives who are not HIV-positive visit, and work alongside other workers who are not HIV-positive.
Odaline Reyes is a 22-year-old nursery school teacher who lives at the sanitarium with her 2-year-old daughter, who is not HIV-positive. She divorced her husband from whom she contacted the disease. There is no division between heterosexual and homosexual patients at the sanitarium.
McConahay tells of meeting a 60-year-old cigar maker. When he found out she was from San Francisco, he took her into his house and showed her a picture of his nephew. The picture lay flat on a table under glass and sprinkled round with fresh yellow flowers like an icon. The young man died of AIDS in San Francisco in January.
“I know it’s a mortal sickness wherever it strikes,” the cigar-maker mused. “But we have these sanitariums here now, you know. I keep thinking if he were home he might have lived longer.”
Personally, I am opposed to a quarantine of HIV-positive or AIDS-infected patients. Even in Cuba, it is probably not necessary. But Cuba is a poor country which does not even produce condoms and must sacrifice to import them.
In the United States—the so-called “land of the free”—there has been a cut in funds for HIV-positive or AIDS patients. President Bush very seldom allows the “A” word to slip through his slimy lips. While the U.S. is cutting its health budget, it is planning to purchase 6724 new military tanks at a price of between $1 million and $1.5 million each.
How many AIDS patients could that money save? While children are dying from measles and whooping cough, and while an epidemic of tuberculosis infections is killing off AIDS victims, Bush and the other politicians are spending billions on weapons.
Two hundred thousand of our youngest people have already died from this vicious disease. How can we stop it?
This country needs to develop another program like the “Manhattan Project.” At the beginning of the Second World War, this government started to develop the atomic bomb. Money was no object. They secured from around the world the best scientists and technicians. They provided them with homes, salaries, and the best scientific equipment and laboratories available.
They did not leave it up to private enterprise. The effort was a completely social effort organized and financed by the government. Of course, the bomb was developed and used to murder hundreds of thousands of Japanese people.
If we want to cure AIDS, we need an AIDS research-and-development campaign on the order of the Manhattan Project. Secure the brightest and most capable minds in the scientific and medical world. Build them the best laboratories possible. Spare no expense. Give them full salary so they can devote 100 percent of their time to finding a cure. Do not allow one private enterprise corporation to stick their fingers in the pie. Only the broadest exchange of information and experiments will allow for speeding the way toward a cure.
The United States is the wealthiest country in the world. But this government puts profits before human needs. That is why the military budget continues to go up and our human needs budget continues to go down. Only a massive, unified fightback against this rotten capitalist economic system that takes from the poor and gives to the rich can change it.
That’s what the Cuban people did in 1959. They took their country out of the hands of the rich and built a society which put human needs of the great majority before profits for the tiny minority of millionaires and billionaires.
And that’s why both political parties want to crush Cuba—because it remains a shining example for the poor, oppressed, and exploited of the world.
—February 1992
FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint Publishing Association
ISBN: 0-9763570-0-3
360 pp.
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