I was mugged in Havana. It was the two-men-and-a-motorcycle routine that can happen anywhere and I hung on to my bag with killer strength. The contents — cigarettes and $20 — spilled to the ground as the tightly woven bag split in two. Half of it disappeared into the darkness at high speed, leaving me lying on the road clinging triumphantly to the other half, blood streaming down my face.
The police arrived in no time and as we drove to the hospital, they sang to me — a harmony for three voices, mellow and tuneful — and the young policeman in the back held my hand reassuringly.
I was not in the slightest bit anxious. Medical care is a priority in Cuba. The doctor-citizen ratio is the highest in the world even though the US blockade has denied the health system its basic necessities. The hospital’s ‘Sala Antiseptico’ was seriously lo-tech and I was immediately suspicious about the accuracy of the sign. There was nothing white. Nor was there any equipment. Or tissues, or disposable plastic glove dispensers, or pump-packs of sterilizing wash, or face masks, or surgical aprons; just a stone sink, a cake of soap and a chattering crowd of supporters and kibitzers — my companions, my companions’ taxi driver who drove them from the scene and refused to leave until I was declared fit, various staff from our hotel, medical students, a hospital cleaner and the police woman who stayed and stroked my arm throughout the procedure.
About ten people in all surrounded the stainless steel table that was my surgical bed and they all stayed for the hour it took the doctor to clean the wound and put ten stitches into my forehead. He finally sat me up, held my shoulders, kissed both cheeks and looked deeply into my eyes. ‘Are you losing your mind?’ he asked. Convinced by my equally comical response in Spanish that I wasn’t in the least bit disoriented, he let me go. No charge, no fee, no bill.
Six weeks earlier I had spent eight hours in a Bronx public hospital. I was raced to the casualty department by a friend when I was overcome by sudden and searing head pain. Unable to walk or talk, I slipped unnoticed to the floor in the hospital corridor and lay there while my terrified friend tried to convince staff that I needed a trolley and a doctor. There I passed the next six hours in and out of consciousness, invisible and undiagnosed. It was only at the intervention of another friend, an emergency specialist from a Brooklyn hospital, that I was finally checked, medicated and billed for $1800.00.
Had I needed help to complete the paperwork there was assistance available in English/Spanish, English/Chinese and English/Portuguese. There was even English/English for illiterate patients, the rapid growth group. Twenty three million American adults are functionally illiterate including 13 per cent of all seventeen-year-olds while the education system dumbs down to accommodate them. That’s one way. Cuban illiteracy was reduced from 40 per cent to zero over a ten year period. That’s another way.
The obsessive, hysterical, tyrannical embargo imposed by the US is a naked political action which aims to sideline Cuba’s extraordinary social achievements. New Zealand’s Ministry of Education is currently implementing a strategy developed in collaboration with Cuban educationalists to achieve adult literacy in poor Maori and islander communities. Venezuela adopted the programme and reduced its illiteracy rate by one million people in six months. Both had the political will of their governments in common.
The World Bank, whose core function is to improve the lives of the poor, has never given assistance, advice or aid to Cuba. Plus, its own current bank indicators reveal that Cuba is living proof that economic growth is not a pre-condition to improving the lives of its people. Two old World Bank hymns out the window.
‘Beautiful work!’ My Manhattan internist approved as he snipped the stitches from my forehead. ‘Trained well but so poorly paid. They’d earn more driving a cab.’ He was still scratching his head blankly when I left the surgery and headed for the Korean day spa to be made presentable again.
On the footpath outside the spa was a homeless woman in her sixties sitting on a blanket with a plastic ground sheet surrounded by assorted packages and bags. I offered her my just lit cigarette before going inside and she responded with a non sequitur about Simone de Beauvoir, the male chromosome and concern for my head wound. Street life had coarsened her features but there was an unmistakable gentility in her hand movements and her speech bore traces of a Hoch Berlin education.
An hour later I emerged barefooted to dry my newly pedicured nails and buy a coffee. I came back with two cappuccinos in paper cups and sat down on the blanket beside her while she rabbited on about the dangers of smoking in anger and how New Yorkers are Albert Camus’ contemporary outsiders. On my other side were my new $600 Prada boots that I was road testing ahead of the winter snow.
We had just finished our coffee when a rather handsome, well dressed man approached. He paused, looked at us, smiled warmly and with an elegant, discreet gesture popped a $5 bill into my empty cup. We laughed like girls, gleeful and knowing.