Cuba tops the class in UN development report

[Downwinder]

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/816/41981

[Judi Lynn]

1. Remarkable! Worth saving for reference. Astonishing, considering its deep handicap,

the 50 year old running war against its economy imposed by the embargo, the longest in history.

From the article:

Cuba tops the class in UN development report
Jenny Francis
31 October 2009

The United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report 2009 was released on October 5. It again highlighted some of Cuba’s extraordinary achievements.

The report is the most commonly referenced source on development statistics and measures. It compares the development status and progress in every country.

Among this year’s wide-ranging statistics, the report provides a summary indicator of people’s well-being using the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI combines measures of life expectancy, literacy, school enrolment and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for 182 countries and territories.

The results for Cuba, an impoverished small island subjected to a crippling economic blockade from the United States, stand out, primarily in the areas of the health and education of its people.

Cuba’s education index is equal highest in the world, along with Australia, Finland, Denmark and New Zealand. Cuba’s education index is 0.993 of a possible score of 1.

Its adult literacy rate is 99.8% and school enrolments are 100%. Public expenditure on education in Cuba is 14.2% of total government expenditure. This is higher than Australia (13.3%) and the US (13.7%).

Cuba tops the world in the ratio of female to male enrolment in primary, secondary and tertiary education, at 121%.

Cuba’s life expectancy is 78.5 years, the highest along with Chile in Latin America and the Caribbean. It compares favourably with Australia (81.4 years) and the US (79.1 years).

[Peace Patriot]

2. Cuba spends more money on education than the U.S.!

Cuba’s education index ... equal(s) (the) highest in the world, along with Australia, Finland, Denmark and New Zealand. Cuba’s education index is 0.993 of a possible score of 1.

(Cuba's) adult literacy rate is 99.8% and school enrolments are 100%. Public expenditure on education in Cuba is 14.2% of total government expenditure. This is higher than Australia (13.3%) and the US (13.7%) .

Cuba tops the world in the ratio of female to male enrolment in primary, secondary and tertiary education, at 121%.

Cuba’s life expectancy is 78.5 years, the highest along with Chile in Latin America and the Caribbean. It compares favourably with Australia (81.4 years) and the US (79.1 years).

While Cuba ranks at or near the top in health and education measures, its low GDP per capita, the third element of the HDI, reduces its HDI score. With GDP included, the report ranks Cuba 51st overall in the overall HDR ranking.

Cuba is ranked 95th in the world in GDP per capita. The gap between its low GDP ranking and much higher overall HDI ranking reveals its human development is significantly higher than its GDP per capita might indicate.

The difference between these two rankings can be seen as a measure of the efficiency of converting a nation’s income into the health and education of its people. Cuba heads the world in this category, by a wide margin.

For example, Mexico has more than double Cuba’s GDP, but has a lower HDI. The US is ranked nine in GDP per capita but falls to 13 in HDI ranking, demonstrating a relatively poor conversion of its wealth into health and education for its people.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/816/41981

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In other words, with far fewer resources, Cuba achieves far superior results in education and health care. It's possible to have excellent education and health care with everyone living modest lifestyles--no $600 million salaries/bonuses for CEOs, no humungous private corporations pushing the latest unnecessary goo-gaws or poisoned foods on the populace with billions of dollars of propaganda, no mega-corps, monopolies and extremely corrupting lobbyists, no "globalisation" (job-killing, ocean-polluting, sweatshop labor promoting cheap imports), no second yachts and third mansions, no corporate resource wars--revenues sufficient for a decent, low-impact life for everyone, but not for greedbag hoarding, gambling and killing.

Forcing the extremely rich and the privileged to share has resulted in horrors that we wouldn't want to see repeated--in Stalinist Russia, eastern Europe and Maoist China--but not in Cuba, which has developed a uniquely Cuban form of communism that has survived, while the big communist systems crumbled, because it is different--more democratic, more humane and arguably more genuine (truer to the ideals of the earliest communists). I've sometimes thought that communism in places like Russia took on the character of prior tyrannies because Russians had never experienced anything else and were very isolated from European and American democracies.

Cuban communism, however, was born right next to the "land of the free, home of the brave," and--much like Vietnam--was influenced by our revolution and democratic progress (the labor movement, the women's suffragist movement, the anti-slavery movement, the civil rights movement), and also by the original Bolivarian revolutions that freed Latin America from Spain and Portugal, and the Haitian revolution. It was born with notions of freedom in the air. It has never had gulags and forced labor camps. Cubans wouldn't put up with that. It has been ruled by a more or less benevolent dictator (I think "benevolent monarch" is the right phrase), possibly necessary because of how much danger Cuba has been in, from the corpo-fascist anti-democrats of the US, throughout its history. Not a mad Stalin, however. Nor a 'Big Brother' Mao. More a "philosopher king" type, who holds the country together with something that closely resembles "consent of the people" and is arguably more democratic than our system has become--now run by oiligarchs and war profiteers and banksters.

We could learn from Cuba--something our Overlords very much don't want us to do. Study the good parts, sort out of the bad--reject some things, experiment with others--like a free people should be able to. Statistics like those in this UN Human Development Report 2009 don't get trumpeted by our corpo-fascist press, and they do everything they can to unjustly demonize Cuba. They don't want us to know that you can have excellent education and health care with low GDP. It's only when the rich loot us all that these things are "unaffordable."

[Braulio]

3. This proves losing weight's a good idea

One reason why Cubans live long is the low proportion of overweight people in the population. Studies done with rats show they live a lot longer when they're fed a low calorie diet, and this is what happens to Cubans. They also have a healthier life style because they walk or ride bikes, and they don't suffer from stress because most of them are government employees. Being a government employee's not too bad if you want job security.

One problem Cubans do have is their education...in the sense that they don't earn very well once they finish their college education. I guess in a country where everybody has a degree then having a degree doesn't really differentiate the individual so he/she can earn a higher salary. I suppose this is one reason why educated Cubans are so keen to get out, they know they can do better outside Cuba.

In a sense, the failure of the Cuban communist system (as it did in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, has its roots in the Communist Party's inability to overcome the people's individualism and the drive they have to look out for themselves and their family first.

Americans should copy some of these ideas. For example, losing weight is definitely something they should focus on. It would also help if they had a more rational health system.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Thanks for your contribution, Braulio! Now I understand...

...how seriously damaging the brainwashing that we are subjected to, by our corpo-fascist press, can be to the human ability to think things through.

And, in an odd way, you are right. Losing some of our "weight"--say, our entire war budget, and all the lard packed around the banksters--could do us a lot of good.

You know what one of the Junta generals in Honduras said? He said that, by their coup, they were preventing "communism from Venezuela reaching the United States." And you know what he was really talking about? The minimum wage that Zelaya raised, the lowered bus ticket price for poor workers, the school lunch program for poor children, and the democratically achieved universal free medical care and free education through college that Venezuelans enjoy, and that are being established in other leftist democracies, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, and that Mel Zelaya was aiming for, in Honduras. These are not communist ideas. They are French ideas, Norwegian ideas, Canadian ideas, British ideas. These are the ideas of the most civilized countries in the world. They are not incompatible with democracy. And in fact some of them were once American ideas. When I was young, a college education at the University of California was FREE.

Capitalism here led to mass starvation, homelessness and joblessness in the U.S. in the 1930s, and has led us right back to that precipice today. Breadlines. Two thousand people applying for one shit job. Bankruptcy for the rest of the century. The closing of all the bathrooms in the state parks near me, severe cutbacks in the schools, pot-holed roads in the once prosperous state of California. That's what unfettered, unregulated, "dog eat dog" capitalism does. We need new ideas, Braulio. We need to look around, and see what works and what doesn't work, in other systems, cuz our system is a disaster area. But no, you want us to make sarcastic remarks about the hardships that Cubans may have undergone--hardships, I might add, in which no one starved.

Not helpful, except that, yeah, we could lose some fat--and some fatcats.

[Braulio]

5. Well, I oppose American Imperialism

But thus far the statistics show communism doesn't work. It's inefficient. I had the opportunity to see what it did in countries in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and it wasn't pretty.

[roody]

6. Is there any chance you read the linked story

about Cuba's extraordinary achievements?