Enrique Ubieta Gómez

SOME days ago, I wrote in my blog about a simple and moving personal experience. It was around 6.00 p.m. In my usual rush, I crossed the far corner of Havana’s Capitol building, facing the remains of the Campoamor Theater -- or the Capitolio Theater, as a sign on its upper wall reads – when I saw a man lying unconscious on the ground. "It’s a drunk," I thought and decided to go on my way. But another man, disheveled and in dirty clothes, standing beside him and who, like me, seemed to be returning home from work, kept repeating agitatedly, "I think he’s suffering from hypoglycemia." He insisted so much that I stopped and looked at the prone man, without seeing anything, of course, because I know nothing about medicine. "Do you know him?" "No," he replied, "but it looks like a hypoglycemic episode: look at the way he’s breathing." Another passer-by also stopped and thought we should find a car to take him to hospital. We were three persons already. But a fourth passer-by continued on his way and even dared to say: "Leave him alone. It’s none of your business and if anything happens, it’ll complicate things for you." The third to arrive replied decidedly: "We have to help him." And then the first man, the one who made us stop with his repetition of ‘the hypoglycemic episode,’ shouted: "Hey, this isn’t the United States! This is Cuba!" Then we saw a passing car. The three of us blocked the street and signaled to the driver to stop. We placed the man on the back seat and the anonymous Good Samaritan got in with him. I don’t know, and probably never will, whether he was drunk or sick, nor what the nature of his illness might have been, but that weary and disheveled Samaritan, who would pass unnoticed in the capital crowd, reminded me that we are living in Cuba.

That’s the anecdote. A few hours later a reader's comment arrived in my blog praising the material bounties of the First World's medical emergency system. "In the United States," he said, "this compensates for the lack of compassion of Americans, being the descendants of Northern cold-blooded Europeans." He added a hypothesis, "That, in the last resort access to wealth is what turns people into egoists or not needing each other." However, I do not believe that lack of solidarity is an inevitable result of being rich, or that the geographical origins of human beings predetermine the intensity of our feelings. Another reader, Arnaldo Fernández, wrote from his personal experience: "I suffered a cardiac arrest and was assisted by the mentioned First World's advanced emergency services and I acknowledge these paramedics' efficacy and professionalism. But the cruel experience comes when these sophisticated ambulances leave you in a hospital where, if you don’t have money or health insurance, they stabilize you and send you back onto the street on foot. In spite of that, I’ll just tell you that a heart attack in 2004 landed me with a debt of $127,000 and a recent five-day stay in hospital, just to have my blood pressure stabilized, cost me a further $55,000. The worst part is yet to come: I left without any prescribed treatment, any follow-up, at the expense of a possible fatal crisis just because I don’t have a health insurance plan to cover the excessive costs of the First World's medical care."

No medical team, no matter how much sophisticated equipment it might have, can replace the moral, professional and human competence of doctors, nor the warm solidarity of citizens. I recall that a CNN Plus anchor woman, in the middle of an endless debate in which I took part, posed a tricky question: "But human beings, aren’t they the same everywhere?" Of course, she wasn’t referring to universal feelings such as love or hate, but to the way in which essentially historic social concepts, such as freedom or human rights, are understood. However, we were dealing with essentially contradictory life projects: those which sustain capitalism or socialism.

I cite this example to illustrate the transnational media's programmed deafness and blindness (and that of the system's politicians of all shades: pink, green or blue) in relation to any alternative social organization: capitalism does not accept the existence of other ways of life if it cannot subordinate them to the system. In such cases, they are simply termed as barbaric (illegal) expressions. Non-acceptance is part and parcel of its ferocious instinct for preservation. In certain countries receiving Cuban medical cooperation, national medical councils have declared this cooperation illegal. Why? Cuban doctors are going into the most remote and/or dangerous areas, they receive a minimum stipend and are living among the poorest people; but they are totally subversive. What for any impartial observer is an act of elemental solidarity and, above all, for the recipients of this cooperation, is presented as rupture of capitalist "legality."