
Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ - mudil
https://nytimes.com/2017/09/29/world/americas/brazil-cuban-doctors-revolt.html
======
dang
All: Generic discussions about communism and other grand ideological themes
are off topic here. Because we're communists? No, because there's nothing new
to say about them, at least not on an internet forum—if you've really found
some, you should write a book. As a topic gets bigger and bigger, what one can
say gets less meaningful. We end up in the space of 'what's new is not good
and what's good is not new', and that is one of the lame squares on the
intellectual curiosity board.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
tmccrmck
Perhaps we should revisit the idea of a political detox?

I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering
over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the
article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical
discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and
flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comment is down.

In signal processing, when noise becomes too high we implement a filter. It
doesn't have to be too harsh of a filter, perhaps a band-stop filter which
passes most frequencies unaltered but attenuates those in a specific range to
very low levels.

~~~
dang
That didn't work, because the question of how to define 'political' is itself
highly political. We knew that before we tried the detox experiment but boy
did we know it afterwards. And it wouldn't be in HN's mandate (like, not at
all) to try to limit it to technical stories. Our core audience, even if it
feels like a minority sometimes, is readers who are interested in both
technical and non-technical things.

> _the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year_

People have been saying that since the beginning. Is it true? Maybe, but there
are strong biases (e.g. it always feels like things are getting worse) and
it's hard to measure.

~~~
_dps
I agree that defining "political" is itself partly political. Having said
that, and just as my 2 cents, I think the experiment was not run long enough
to be conclusive.

People always complain with changes. I think it's reasonable to believe that
people who actively want politics on HN would be on the noisier end of the
spectrum of complainers. Any attempt to get these conversations off HN was
bound, initially, to cause a loud and pointed reaction from one subset of
users.

But people also adapt and forget. I think there's a real chance that after,
say, 6-8 weeks, HN would have established a "new normal" and people would know
that it's not a place to discuss the outrage of the week, just as it's already
known it's not a place to discuss the latest celebrity-dancing-baking-show
scandals.

I'll reiterate that it's a very tricky problem. But I don't agree that there
was conclusive evidence that the political detox "didn't work" \-- it was
canceled long before a steady state was reached.

------
hellothere007
I had the luck of leaving Cuba 4 years ago and then my family came as well, my
mother was a doctor for 25 years and I had asked her a lot of questions about
why doctors left to go on a "mission" to any of these countries.

One of the incentives the Cuban Government used to use to make doctors go to
those "missions" as they call it in Cuba, is that once they have finished it
they were allowed to buy a house or car, I say allowed because until recently
you couldn't buy any of it without the government authorization.

Nowadays they used another technique which is; we will allow you to bring back
1 container ( those in ships) full of whatever you want, as usual the with the
government they haven't been allowing it even though those doctors already
spent 2-3 years on the "mission" so those people went there with that promise
and it turn got nothing.In Cuba the whole idea of making 1.3k/month sounds
great and many doctors blindly agree to go without knowing first how much they
will spend on food/clothes/supplements etc, but of course they can't really
look up that information because internet until recently was non existent and
nowadays WIFI access cost $1.5/hr ( CUC) which is their salary of a fully day.

Of course that's modern day slavery, the government acts as your owner, they
set the condition and can change it at will, if you don't abide them, well you
have two options: \- back to Cuba in 24 hours and be prepare to have your
doctor's license removed \- stay in the country and be exiled for 8 years.

PS: Until recently, doctors in Cuba weren't allowed to leave the country under
any circumstances except for "missions", the government train of thoughts is "
I own all these people".

------
huac
> But in one of his final attempts to normalize relations with Cuba, President
> Barack Obama in January ended the program, which had allowed Cuban doctors
> stationed in other countries to get permanent residency visas for the United
> States.

When I visited Cuba this spring, there was a palpable level of resentment
towards Obama for this change, as well as the end of the 'wet feet dry feet'
policy [1]. Tourism dollars are good but probably not worth giving up 'plan
B.'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_feet,_dry_feet_policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_feet,_dry_feet_policy)

~~~
microcolonel
It's funny how the first priority of the Cuban government in those
negotiations was to prevent the people from being able to leave.

The second priority was to pimp out the people for more pocket money.

Now that's Progressive.™

------
Klockan
> The pastor was outraged to learn that, under the terms of their employment,
> Cuban doctors earn only about a quarter of the amount the Brazilian
> government pays Cuba for their services.

This is how Sweden finances their free education as well, it is called taxes.
The problem isn't with how Cuba treats specifically doctors but how Cuba
refuses to let people emigrate in general.

~~~
nslav
Yes that confused me a bit as well... I work for a US-based engineering
company and they bill clients 3 - 4x what I earn for my work. Am I
misunderstanding something about the article?

~~~
mark_edward
Yes. It's propaganda.

~~~
curun1r
It's propaganda, but it still points to a system of perverse incentives that
the Cuban Government should address. My parents took a bicycling trip to Cuba
a number of years ago. Their guide had a wife who was a doctor. He made ~20x
what she did because he earned his money by serving foreigners. So in a
country that tries to make everyone equal, there are still tiers of wealth and
the people in the upper tiers are the ones who are arguably doing the least
valuable work for their society.

Note that this is a problem not limited to communist countries like Cuba. In
America, in particular, we have this problem when it comes to our teachers.
Teaching the next generation is one of the most important jobs we have and,
yet, the pay is so low that the best people for the job are disincentivized to
go into that profession. When a hedge fund manager managing teacher pensions
out-earns an entire school faculty who are invested in his fund while
underperforming the S&P, we too have a problem.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
You know I can't really feel their plight. Take this:

>Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the
work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment. “You are
trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what
price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.”

Is that not the point? The communist government allows anybody to attend their
very good medical schools totally for free. This doctor hasn't even made it to
34 and she wants to opt out, how many 34 y/o american doctors are even close
to paying down their debt? Seems weird to come from a country which is
explicitly organized around giving everybody a chance to succeed and then upon
success saying, yeah but I don't like paying for it.

~~~
notyourday
The love of communism among those that don't live in places that tried to
implement it is something that totally baffles me.

~~~
gozur88
I think it's understandable. They see parts they like and either ignore or
don't know about the rest. The most anti-communist places you'll find are in
Eastern Europe where the old people remember going through sub-zero winters
without heat.

~~~
jrochkind1
> The most anti-communist places you'll find are in Eastern Europe

I'm not totally sure that's still true. It might be. But I think a lot of
people are now nostalgic for communism after living what is apparently the
alternative for them.

The most anti-communist people I know, though, are definitely some people in
_the U.S._ from Eastern European countries, who moved here before or shortly
after the end of communism. (I also know some people in the U.S. from Russia
especially who are not particularly anti-communist. Russia definitely had it
better than most other soviet bloc). (Also, the very poor seldom get to
immigrate to the U.S. from Eastern Europe either before or after communism,
immigrants are not a representative sample. Although I knew a lot of poor-ish
undocumented immigrant Poles in Chicago in the late 90s. They weren't
particularly anti-communist by and large.)

But yeah, the grass is often greener, as they say.

------
jwilliams
In Cuba often tourist dollars greatly outstrip the local economy. So you're
ending up with a situation where qualified doctors are moving in to tourism -
waiters, doormen - to earn more money.

~~~
smt88
Where did you learn about this? I'd like to investigate in more detail.

~~~
kilroy123
I heard the same thing from locals when I was there. I have no other evidence
to support this.

~~~
wcfields
Same here; evidence I have to support is that the ONLY people with (newer)
cars [1] were Airbnb hosts. My host not only owned a late-model Suzuki 4door
but also was getting into the business of "flipping" old apartments into
Airbnbs/Casa particular. Since he had 24 hour access to the internet
(somehow?? [2]) he also acted as the agent for other Airbnbs for people that
didn't have access.

[1] Of course there were people with the old cars, but these were passed down
and are, as I understand it, required by law to act as a mini-bus service.

[2] Although internet in Cuba is only officially available by buying a hourly
code on a scratcher card from the telephone company and then Wifi is in the
parks in Havana, I did notice bootleg Wifi SSIDs when walking the streets.
They were easy to spot even without "war-walking" since they are a good 1/2 km
from any nearby park and had usually a dozen folks on their phones browsing
Facebook or using Skype. I suspect it's either an insider connection at the
telephone company OR a clandestine Directway / Hughesnet satellite (there are
NO visible dishes in Cuba, I believe it must be illegal).

~~~
wmil
Key West to Havana is only 170 km or so. Can you set up a microwave / laser
link over that distance?

------
jws
The doctors are outraged at only getting paid 25% of their billing rate. Back
in the '90s I worked with a lot of engineers billed out to customers by
Digital at $200/hr who were paid less than $50/hr. They certainly didn't
consider themselves slaves.

~~~
user5994461
Back in the 90's you could have a better life with $50 an hour than today with
twice that.

------
seanalltogether
Am I right in assuming this is very similar to most work abroad agreements? I
work for a company AAA that sponsors my visa to work in Brazil. If i want to
leave AAA, I must go back to America or find someone else willing to sponsor
my work visa? Additionally my company may be charging the client 2x-4x what
they pay me.

~~~
hellothere007
well, you can find someone willing to sponsor your visa but they can't, they
aren't allowed to, and if the leave the "mission" they are considered traitors
or deserters and get exiled for 8 years

------
throwawayknecht
This feels like an awfully insensitive metaphor given Afrocuban history and
its role in Castro's revolution.

You might be getting an awfully short end of a stick, but if you're getting
free education and free health care at that level, you are _not_ justified
invoking slavery as a comparison, given the history there.

------
nsxwolf
The SV atitude on communism threads is always interesting. Communism is great,
quit whining you greedy doctors. Helping people is its own reward! But for me?
No no, I'm a developer! I deserve my salary!

~~~
varjag
I once reported to a department manager who was an anarchist. He had pretty
tight control structure in the org without any disregard to hierarchy.

~~~
partiallypro
Anarchy isn't the lack of governance or hierarchy, it's the lack of a
government. Not an anarchist, they generally have the worst possible
ideas...but he wasn't really a hypocrite for this.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Right now Nazism is rightfully consigned to the trash heap of history and
mostly people don't talk about it in polite company. Communism should also
undergo the same fate. It probably has the highest body count of any ideology
(see Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro ) and is the only ideology where a country
built a wall, not keep people from coming in, but to keep people from leaving.
It has made millions of people miserable, so miserable in fact, that
multitudes of people risked their lives to flee it.

TLDR: Nazism and Communism should be in the same bucket.

~~~
curun1r
I somewhat agree, but any connection between Communism and Socialism needs to
similarly find its way to that trash heap. Communism's failing is its
seemingly inescapable combination with totalitarianism and despotism, which
was a significant problem with Nazism as well. It's not the principle that
society is responsible for caring for and providing for it's citizens. For too
long, we've resisted more socialist policies because those with a vested
interest in the status quo were able to paint them as communist.

But Socialism has been successful enough in European countries at this point
to be fully differentiated from Communism despite sharing that single
principle. In The United States, in particular, there is still a legacy of the
'red scare' that's used to push back against socialist policies that would
greatly improve this country and that needs to end too.

~~~
jules
That is not what socialism used to mean. European countries are capitalist
with a welfare state. This was first set up in Germany by Bismarck, and the
socialists were opposed to it. Socialism used to mean that the means of
production were in the hands of the government, and by that standard Europe is
certainly not socialist. The capital is privately owned and the decisions
about how to use that capital are made by those owners. The wealth that is
redistributed in Europe is created by capitalism. Europe does not differ
significantly from the US in this regard; the government expenditure as a
percentage of GDP in "socialist" Europe is not very different than
"capitalist" United States. The US spends 42% whereas France and Sweden
(usually considered the two most socialist countries in Europe) it is 56% and
51%, respectively. In Germany it's 45% and in Switzerland 35%.

~~~
huac
What is the percentage of non-defense GDP spending? I'd guess that the delta
is larger.

~~~
jules
The US spends 3.3% of GDP on military whereas France spends 2.3%, so while
excluding this makes the delta larger, it won't make a significant dent.

~~~
curun1r
IIRC, that 3.3% is just for the 5 branches of the military and doesn't include
intelligence spending (~$80b/yr) or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which are
around $2.4 trillion dollars thus far over ~14 years. A more honest number is
probably above 4%.

------
0xbear
Yup. The only people who like communism are the ones who have never lived
under a communist regime. Ask any Eastern European over 40 about what that’s
like before you make any rash decisions out of ignorance.

------
danjoc
They should come to America. Doctors are never overworked here.

