CUBA - Health without wealth

BRENDAN SAINSBURY

1st June, 2005

Starved of funding by the US embargo and the Soviet Union's collapse, Cuba has a health service to put its rich northern enemy to shame. Much of the responsibility for this medical miracle is due to the island's transformation into a model of environmental
good practice

It's 5pm Havana-time on the Cuban capital's crescent-shaped Malec—n sea-drive, and a handsome and svelte-looking taxi driver is steering his battered automobile - a 1955 Chevrolet recently refitted with a Lada engine - painfully homewards to a cacophony of unhealthy screeching. Old men cling to fishing lines, young couples kiss on the promenade, and a group
of off-duty nurses stand outside the giant facade of the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital trying to hitch a free ride back west through crumbling Vedado.

Welcome to Cuba - land of trade embargoes and clapped out old cars, free healthcare and libidinous young taxi drivers. Forty-six years after a cigar-puffing Fidel Castro first rolled triumphantly into Havana atop a jeep with the dashing Che in tow, Cuba remains famous for its failed politics, questionable human rights record and a transport system stuck incongruously
in the 1950s. It might come as some surprise, therefore, to discover that - literally speaking - the health of the nation is still in remarkably good shape, particularly in contrast to that of its much larger neighbour, and enemy, to the north. It's hard to resist the comparison. In the US the federal government forks out an

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