From The Real Cuba:
One of the greatest fallacies about the so called ‘Cuban Revolution’ has to do with healthcare. Foreigners who visit Cuba, are fed the official line from Castro’s propaganda machine: “All Cubans are now able to receive excellent healthcare, which is also free.”
But the truth is very different. Castro has built excellent health facilities for the use of foreigners, who pay with hard currency for those services. Argentinean soccer star Maradona, for example, has traveled several times to Cuba to receive treatment to combat his drug addiction. But Cubans are not even allowed to visit those facilities. Cubans who require medical attention must go to other hospitals, that lack the most minimum requirements needed to take care of their patients. In addition, most of these facilities are filthy and patients have to bring their own towels, bed sheets, pillows, or they would have to lay down on dirty bare mattresses stained with blood and other body fluids.
The first four photographs were published in September of 2004 in one of Sweden most influential newspapers, Dagens Nyheter. They were taken at a health facility for elderly Cubans. The others were taken by people who were living in Cuba until very recently, or who visited the island as tourists.
See the photographs here.
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Bad Cuban Medicine>by Larry Solomon (April 15, 2003)
Begging for medicines is common in Havana – next to begging for money to feed children, it is the most common plea – because the government won’t use its scarce foreign exchange to import basic drugs that the populace needs. Doctors won’t even prescribe drugs for the poor that aren’t available in the local pharmacies – the state frowns upon that – but many will write the name of the drug that’s needed on a scrap of paper.