The Boston Globe has a somewhat silly article about Cuban health care.

The close friendship between Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has netted Venezuela a loan of 20,000 Cuban health workers -- including 14,000 doctors, according to the Venezuelan government -- who work in poor barrios and rural outposts for stipends seven times higher on average than their salaries at home. Castro has vowed to send Chavez as many as 10,000 additional medical workers by year's end.

In return for farming out more than one-fifth of its doctors to the petroleum-rich state, Cuba is permitted to import 90,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela under preferential terms. The arrangement gives Cuba's struggling economy, crippled by the US embargo in place since 1963, the biggest boost since the country lost Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s.

The Cuban doctors program is wildly popular among Venezuela's poor. But Cubans have begun to object that the exodus of their healthcare workers is taking a toll on medical care for Cubans. Most people interviewed would speak only on condition that they not be identified or asked that just their first names be used, for fear of reprisals.

Then the article goes on to claim there might be some positive benefits to the Cuban health care system.Of course Cuban numbers are believed by much of the MSM.It's hard to believe a country that doesn't have running electicity 7 days a week,in which people live like morons writing bikes to work(because of car shortages) can't be anything but barbaric.But,you've got to love the quote by multi-millionare dictator Fidel Castro

''I know how much a heart bypass costs in the US. . . . I dream that one day Americans will come to Cuba to receive treatment."

You've got to wonder if things are so great in Fidel's giant prison why people are trying to flee?