I recently came across this interesting article by Stephen Kinzer published in the Guardian. In it, he compares the rights and services provided to citizens in Cuba vs. those in other non-state socialist Caribbean and Central American countries. As he lays it out, education, security, health care for Cubans, vs. the legal right (if difficult to realize in practice) to freedom of speech and opportunity for poor Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and others, who often live in fear and have little access to health care and education.
It is a more open approach than you often see in the press, posing a question to readers: Which would you choose? A government in control that curtails your freedoms of speech, commerce, and movement but delivers basic services (you can argue the quality of the Cuban services, but the UN´s health statistics show they do much better than most), or a government that extends these rights on paper, but often can´t guarantee them in practice and doesn´t deliver on the services?
The article reminded me of a conversation I participated in when I was doing research in Cuba in 2002. I was at a cafe with a Cuban artist and an American woman who had just arrived in Cuba from a couple of weeks in Guatemala.
¨Wow,¨ said the woman. ¨Cuba is impressive. I don´t see the misery here that I saw in Guatemala.¨
The Cuban painter bristled at her comment. ¨How can you compare Cuba to Guatemala?¨ he began. ¨We don´t have an indigenous population. Everyone speaks Spanish here, unlike Guatemala. We have good infrastructure, much of which was built in the 1950s. We are a small country, with resources, and cultural cohesion. We shouldn´t be compared with Guatemala. We should be compared with Switzerland. And, if you do that...how do we stand up?¨
It was a paradigm adjusting moment for those of us listening. How do you begin to compare nations? What is a fair comparison? What isn´t? And for sure, if Cuba´s freedoms and services are measured against Switzerland rather than against Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua, the perspective changes.
That said, I think that Kinzer´s question is provocative: If you had to choose, which would be more important to you? The freedom to get the health care you need when you need it, or the freedom to say and publish what you think about your government?
But maybe framing the question this way, as the Cuban painter suggested, is misleading and gives weight to a false dichotomy. What do you think?
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I'm not really sure what I think here, but it is indeed an interesting question to ask which would a populace choose, if given a genuine choice.
In terms of asking the question, and the Cuban's bristling at the comparison, I thought of a friend of mine who is a teacher who feels that comparing the American educational system with various European systems is not really fair. He argues that in reports from the U.S., we include all of our students, from the gifted to the mentally challenged, while European countries tend to send information only of their best students. He feels, with that type of differentiation, that the U.S. still has the best overall educational system in the world (personally, I would then want to see the comparison among the best we have to offer with the best of other nations, and then see where we are).
I will have to give more thought to the Cuban's perspective. I think that the idea of suggesting that the presence of indiginous populations impair national cohesion to the point where comparing Cuba and Guatemala is not useful doesn't really work. After all, Switzerland is a nation that has four distinct languages spoken within its borders, and I would assume that there are cultural differences among those groups. So is it really any better to compare Cuba with Switzerland, based on that Cuban's perspective?
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