A Major Problem!!
Nick Miroff of the Washington Post is a fair-minded journalist as well as a Latin American and Cuban expert. His major article this second week of February-2017 is entitled "Cuba Wants More Babies..." and it was so interesting and revealing it was also published by the Miami Herald and other major venues.
The photo above courtesy of Ramon Espinosa/AP illustrated Nick Miroff's insightful article that included these major points:
"Cuba is giving parental leave to the grandparents of newborns, the country's latest attempt to reverse its sagging birthrate and defuse a demographic time bomb.
"The island already has one of the most generous parental leave policies in the Americas, allowing mothers and fathers to take more than one year off from work at partial pay. The new degree extends those benefits to maternal and paternal grandparents.
"The island of 11 million has one of the lowest fertility rates in the Western Hemisphere, with 1.7 births per woman.
"Cuba's healthcare system makes contraceptives widely available, and abortions are available on demand. At the same time, Cuban women are a growing portion of the country's professional workforce, and many choose to delay motherhood until their late 30s.
"Some 60,000 to 80,000 Cubans emigrate each year...nearly one-fifth of the island's population is 60 or older...Cuba's life expectancy is 78, on a par with the United States."
The informative Nick Miroff article blamed most of Cuba's problems, including its lack of babies, on Cuba's own revolutionary mistakes. But the photo above -- courtesy of the Miami Herald and taken this month of Feb.-2017 -- actually is much more truthful regarding "Cuba's problems" than anything Cuba has done to undermine its own survival or its sovereignty. Miroff does mention that Revolutionary Cuba spends an extremely high percentage of its limited wealth on caring for its people -- including free education, free healthcare, etc. What Miroff doesn't mention is that this has been done since 1959 despite daily assaults from the U. S., the nearby superpower. The above photo was taken a few days ago at Miami International Airport. It shows Cuban doctor Carlos Ariel Amigo arriving in Miami, along with other Cuban doctors, after being stranded for a time in Colombia. In 2006 the massive army of unchecked counter-revolutionary zealots working for President George W. Bush concocted something called The Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program and, as always, had no problem getting the U. S. Congress to legalize it to buttress many other regime-change schemes. Cuba has long had thousands of well-trained doctors working in the poorest areas of other countries and the Parole Program encouraged and rewarded those doctors to defect to the U. S., not so unlike the egregious Wet Foot-Dry Foot law that encouraged and rewarded Cubans who defect to the United States with instant discriminatory privileges unavailable to all non-Cubans. On January 12th, 2016 -- just 8 days before his two presidential terms ended -- President Obama used an Executive Order to finally end both the Parole Program and Wet Foot-Dry Foot. But the plane-load of Cuban doctors shown arriving in Miami under the Parole Program incentives occurred just a few days ago, allegedly because these doctors had defected just prior to Obama's January 12th ruling.
This photo shows Cuban doctors still stranded in Colombia because President Obama ended the Parole Program that was designed to entice and reward them if they defected. Many other Cubans trying to cross into the U. S. are currently stranded in places such as Nuevo Laredo near the Mexican border because Obama also ended the decades-old Wet Foot-Dry Foot law. Americans, even those who think that would-be immigrants should at the very least be seriously vetted, have long been propagandized not to object to Cubans instantaneously being OK'd and quickly rewarded by the Parole Program and by Wet Foot-Dry Foot, although such gross discriminations designed to hurt Cuba have resulted in other not-so-propagandized nations voting 191-to-0 in the United Nations to condemn such anti-Cuban U. S. policies.
In contrast to the photo of the plane-load of specially incentivized and enticed Cuban doctors defecting to Miami with unique privileges a few days ago, the photo above shows Cuban doctors loading a Cuban airplane with boxes of supplies before they are flown to a poor, neglected region that needs them.
This photo shows a Cuban doctor vaccinating Haitian children. Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas, has been ravaged by such things as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, rampant diseases, etc. The first nation to always arrive with totally free help and the last to leave is...Cuba. Cuba's medical scientists have developed cancer and diabetic drugs that American doctors are trying to obtain despite the embargo. Cuba devoted millions of scarce pesos to finance Operation Miracle that improved or restored eyesight free-of-charge to many of the poorest people in the Caribbean and Latin America. Cuba to this day provides free medical scholarships to poor foreigners, including hundreds of Americans. The World Health Organization, the Pan-Am Health Organization and the World Bank regularly praise Cuba for such things but the U. S. government and the U. S. media, in deference to the Cuban-exile hardliners, are generally not permitted such freedoms, similar to the fact that, for decades, everyday Americans have been the only people in the world without the freedom to visit Cuba, lest they might challenge the usual anti-Cuban counter-revolutionary propaganda. However, in the closing days of the Obama presidency, the AP did mention that Cuba was the first nation in the world to totally eliminate the transmission of AIDs from "mother-to-child" and the U. S. government did praise Cuba for leading the fight against the Ebola crisis in Africa. But now, during the Trump presidency, Bush-type insanity and cruelty is expected to replace Obama's decent overtures regarding Cuba...probably meaning that such things as the Parole Program incentives for Cuban doctors will be reinstated and such things as the Cuban doctor above vaccinating Haitian children will be frowned upon by extremists in control of America's Cuban policies.
Which brings me back around to Nick Miroff's insightful and high-profile article that originated in the Washington Post and was anti-Cuban enough to also be published by the Miami Herald and other counter-revolutionary venues. Nick Miroff explained that, among Cuba's myriad of other problems, the island is trying desperately to encourage more Cuban women to have more Cuban babies. Countering that desperation is a multitude of paradoxes -- such as Cuba's excellent healthcare that produces extremely low infant mortality rates and world-class longevity; Cuba's weak economy and its burgeoning entrepreneur opportunities for young women; and the legion of economic missteps made by the island's revolutionary government. I have no problem with that part of Nick Miroff's analysis concerning why Cuba needs more babies but Miroff's just blaming Cuba for the situation is unusual because he normally provides both sides of two-sided Cuban stories, making him a rarity among U. S. journalists. Of course, the other side of that baby conundrum in Cuba is this: Cuba is the only nation in the world that has had to spend six decades trying to survive the most concerted efforts by a super powerful nation to destroy it...including decades-old efforts to LEGALLY starve it to death and drastically encourage its best-educated young people to defect. And in conclusion, I don't think America's vital trade partners on its northern and southern borders -- Canada and Mexico -- could have survived all these decades under such Cuban-like assaults and, frankly, I'm infatuated with trying to determine how Revolutionary Cuba has actually survived since 1959.
In other words, I believe if the four people above -- fully supported by such powerful entities as the U. S. Congress and Republican presidential Commanders-in-Chief -- had targeted Canada or Mexico the way they and their associates have targeted Cuba, I don't believe Canada or Mexico could have survived intact and sovereign. BUT CUBA...little teeny Cuba!?! I'm still wondering and if I figure it out, I'll be sure to let you know.
Meanwhile:
I agree with that unanimous 191-to-0 vote in the United Nations, the vote that Americans are supposed to totally ignore but the vote that confirms that every nation in the world agrees that self-serving forces in a rich foreign superpower should not be provided the wherewithal to punish this sleepy little Cuban schoolgirl and her very watchful mother all their lives.
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