Cuba is another country which has been facing the wrath of imperialist USA for socializing the medical system through a revolution. Through an ever-lasting economic warfare beginning from 1959, USA has tried to undermine the socialist programs of Cuba and destroy its public health experiment. Despite continued US attempts at economically destabilizing the nation, Cuba has maintained its infrastructure of medical internationalism and socialist health system. The current health system of Cuba represents a unified and generalized medical administration, predicated on the moral economy of revolution. It is based on what Che Guevara poetically wrote in "Revolutionary Medicine" back then in 1960: "The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth ... far more important than good remuneration is the pride of serving one's neighbor. Much more definitive and much more lasting than all the gold that one can accumulate is the gratitude of a people. And each doctor, within the circle of his activities, can and must accumulate that valuable treasure, the gratitude of the people"
As the Covid-19 pandemic intensifies, anti-imperialist opposition to USA is growing. The complete collapse of healthcare in USA, the concomitant crumbling of Latin America's health system due to the continent's neoliberalization and external dependency on the Global North, is forcefully foregrounding the prospects of a socialist health regime. Socialized medicine, which had until now seemed unimaginable, appears perfectly conceivable as the capitalist health system sacrifices millions of people at the altar of profit and collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Previously published at ZNet.
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