Cuba continues to misbehave

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Just this week Cuba has sent doctors and nurses to Honduras and Qatar to fight the global pandemic.

After sending medical professionals to 19 countries in a short period of time, Cuba stood out as one of the few countries to lead the global fight against the novel coronavirus.

Qatar on Wednesday became the latest country the Caribbean nation has extended help after Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in the Gulf nation.

While tiny, poor Cuba has sent medical teams to 19 countries, the U.S. has sent medical teams to...(checks notes)...no one.
The U.S. has instead went with the strategy of pressuring countries to reject help from Cuban doctors. A strategy that obviously is not working.
One place that the strategy has succeeded is in Brazil.

As the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 rose to nearly 2,500 on Sunday, Jair Bolsonaro left his presidential palace in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, to fraternize with flag-waving radicals.

Among the demands their banners listed were an end to the social distancing measures opposed by Bolsonaro, the closure of Brazil’s congress and supreme court, and a re-run of a dictatorship-era decree used by military rulers in the late 1960s to suffocate their political opponents.

“The era of roguery is over. Now it’s the people who are in power,” Bolsonaro proclaimed outside the Brazilian army headquarters, coughing repeatedly as he spoke.
...Even members of the military top brass were reportedly upset, with one senior official urging citizens to ignore Bolsonaro’s actions. “Let the president talk to the nutters on his lonesome,” they told the news magazine Veja.

Bolsonaro, who smeared the Cuban doctors in Brazil as a nefarious fifth column, denigrated them as “terrorists,” and expelled them, has since reversed this policy.
However it appears that this was done too late.

Researchers at a group of respected Brazilian universities and institutes said last week there were probably close to 12 times more cases of coronavirus than were being officially reported by the government in Latin America’s largest country, home to some 211m people. As of Sunday, Brazil had more than 38,000 confirmed cases, which would put the true tally at 456,000.

“The rapid course of the pandemic and the low number of tests performed in Brazil make it difficult to estimate the actual number of confirmed cases,” the Health Operations and Intelligence Nucleus, or NOIS, said.

The corrupt, U.S.-backed coup government in Honduras, that systematically gutted its health care system, and called out the military to violently suppress its own doctors and nurses, was also a U.S. success story until this week.
Fortunately the U.S. news media is always there to set the record straight.

A March Bloomberg opinion article (3/23/20) headlined “Coronavirus Could Give Cuba’s Flying Doctors New Wings,” for example, came equipped with the following caveat in the subheadline: “But allowing Havana to exploit the virus for hard currency will just empower repression at home.”

Yes, Cuba is "exploiting the virus" by saving people's lives, but America is above those sorts of things.

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That is an actual negative price.

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CB's picture

@gjohnsit

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vtcc73's picture

By “...America is above those sorts of things.” you’re talking about saving people’s lives, right?

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"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."

Roy Blakeley's picture

@vtcc73 The US would never stoop so low as to gratuitously save lives. I will answer for gjohnsit who is probably elsewhere witnessing the collapse of oil prices to below 0.

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CB's picture

@Roy Blakeley
of the lives to be saved. The PTB will first do a cost/benefit analysis. After all, you must realize that not all lives are equal. For example, the current rate in Afghanistan is 1 American to 1,500 Afghani's. In Yemen, they are not even worth the cost of a body bag. I'm pretty sure the Defense Department has a chart somewhere for the various countries they are in conflict with.

Cuba is a special case. There is still a debt of thousands of Cuban lives to be made up for the extensive damage Cuba did to the US during the Bay of Pigs humanitarian relief operation. Interest alone has probably tripled the number by now.

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Hawkfish's picture

As of yesterday. The way I compute it is designed to minimise policy differences by comparing apples to apples within a jurisdiction and time window (14 days). That is poor by world standards and typical of places where things are about to hit the fan.

Even worse is Russia, which is at 4.8 days - by their own numbers. Compare that to the US at 13 or NZ at 40.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg