FERNANDO ARRABAL
15
SOCIALIST MEDICINE AND SUICIDE
In today's Cuba there is no child who is not brutalized in a
camp, no statistic that is not overcome in a pamphlet.
The sick, rather than fighting their own disease, are condemned
to cure the State's.
With the money they pay for drugs, Cubans not only buy
medicine but also underwrite a bankrupt State, and are thereby
doubly deserving of the name "patient."
You have devised an extraordinary plan to pay the costs of the
Ministry of Public Health.
As you know, a sick man has to work two or three days to pay
for a small bottle of vitamin pills .
If
the same sick man were lucky enough to live four hundred
kilometers from Havana, in Miami, with only an hour of his labor
he could buy the same pills ... but with better packaging, larger
doses , and three supplementary vitamins .
Cuba, to the best of my knowledge, has the highest prices for
medicines in the world .
Poor Cubans - ninety-five percent of the population - pay
with their blood
or the blood of their families
for admission to a hospital.
And as you well know, this isn't poetic license, it is a reality
made up of bloodstones and leukocytes.
And what do you do with the blood of your people?
You sell it to the highest bidder.
How I wish these horrors had never happened. How I would
rejoice if someone could show me that the information I have re–
ceived from so many sources is false!
It is no triumph for a man to contemplate the misfortune of
another.
Don't you grow tired of devising slavetrader's schemes day and
night?
Don't you weary of always hanging hate in the doorways, of
ruling walls with cracks, eyes with tears and hearts with hatred?
Don't you grow tired of being a tyrant?
"The world is more backward today than it was fifty years ago,"
writes Orwell in 1984, referring to the Cuba that you have im–
poverished .
In hospitals in Cuba the workers are devoured by mosquitoes,
cockroaches, flies and heat, and from their hospital cots, their beds
