Fidel and Health Care for the People

Dear Friends of Peace and Socialism

Upon reading the latest Reflection by Fidel Castro Ruz : http://solidnet.org/cgi-bin/agent?news/021cuba8sep09.doc on the cowardice and duplicity of the Dutch company Philips in reneging since 2006 on its obligations to supply Cuba and Venezuela with advanced medical equipment, by cravenly caving into pressure from first the Clinton, then Bush and now apparently the Obama administration, it helps to put into perspective the real essence of the public debate and struggle under way in the United States over health care. The struggle has become clouded in liberal and right wing extremist rhetoric and reeks with hypocrisy.

The Obama government is posing as an advocate of a humane and improved health care system for citizens of the USA while at the same time perpetuating long standing US imperialist policy of interference in the attempts of the Cuban and Venezuelan people to solve their health care needs. The policy is causing untold damage to people in these countries in need of health care by denying them high tech diagnostic equipment. President Obama is responsible for hurting the men, women, children and youth of Venezuela. The same interests that seek to deny the people of Venezuela medical equipment are the same interests that attack the Canadian health care system. To say otherwise is the worst possible kind of opportunist evasion.

How then can we consider Obama or any liberal-democrat would be reformer to be a reliable advocate of a truly human health care system? One cannot have a reactionary foreign policy and a progressive domestic policy. What is important is to advance and fight for the type of health care system we need, instead of taking sides with one or the other of a losing proposition.

Fidel’s expose underlines once more, the consistency of all of the governments of the United States from the end of WW2 to now to react with hate and envy at any and all attempts of other peoples to take paths of development that do not have the approval of US Presidents and the powerful imperialist interests they so faithfully serve. Rest assured the US imperialists disapprove of the Canadian public health care system with the same hatred as they express for the Cuban and Venezuelan system.

As a Communist I find it unacceptable, for left progressives anywhere to give uncritical support to Obama without exposing his unforgiveable complicity in perpetuating long standing US imperialist foreign and domestic policy. Obama seeks to change the image of US imperialism not its essence.

There can be no real advance for the people of the USA or the America’s and that includes Canada, and for that matter the world until US imperialism is defeated. That must be said first as we undertake struggles to wrest reforms from this monstrous system we know as capitalism in the imperialist era. In fact that is why we undertake them. There can be no health care advance for the people of the USA until there is a public health care system in which for profit health care is excluded entirely. A private-public mixed health care system is a private for profit system that attempts to profit out of the public purse and the personal wages, savings and incomes of working people. A retreat from public health care in Canada to a private public mix is being promoted everyday by profiteers, many US health care, drug and supply giants who seek to destroy the Canadian system. They are the same interests that hate socialist Cuba and Venezuela and seek to deny their people needed equipment.

As I read material emanating from the left progressive forces in the USA, much of which is useful and informative, I am more and more struck by what seems to me to be a delusionary, self absorbed, rosy and uncritical view of the line of the Obama administration that is retreating in confusion everyday under a right wing onslaught from the hopes of the people of the USA that brought it to power. To continue to deliberately evade that reality seems to me to be laying the basis and objectively supports what the right wing is striving for, a major political defeat for the left, democratic, labour and people’s movements.

As we Canadians confront a possible federal election, it is up to the conscious progressive left and in the first place the Communists, to go to the people with a program that begins with saying the obvious, capitalism is incapable of meeting their expectations for full employment, health, decent housing, and a truly human life. We fight for reforms to make things better but we do not cover up the fact that we do so with the aim of overthrowing and defeating the system of capitalism that is the cause of the misery of economic depression and war.

No other forces on the left are saying that convincingly. No other task is more important.

Don Currie
Chair, Canadians for Peace and Socialism