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by Marjorie Cohn
March 18, 2016
from
GlobalResearch Website
In
advance of President
Barack Obama's
historic visit to Cuba on March 20, there is speculation about
whether he can pressure Cuba to improve its human rights.
But a
comparison of Cuba's human rights record with that of the United
States shows that the US should be taking lessons from Cuba.
The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
contains two different categories of human rights:
Civil and political rights include the
rights to life, free expression, freedom of religion, fair trial,
self-determination; and to be free from torture, cruel treatment,
and arbitrary detention.
Economic, social and cultural rights
comprise the rights to education, healthcare, social security,
unemployment insurance, paid maternity leave, equal pay for equal
work, reduction of infant mortality; prevention, treatment and
control of diseases; and to form and join unions and strike.
These human rights are enshrined in two
treaties:
-
International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (ICCPR)
-
International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)
The United States has ratified the ICCPR.
But the US refuses to ratify the ICESCR.
Since the Reagan administration, it has
been US policy to define human rights only as civil and political
rights. Economic, social and cultural rights are dismissed as akin
to social welfare, or socialism.
The US government criticizes civil and
political rights in Cuba while disregarding Cubans' superior access
to universal housing, health care, education, and its guarantee of
paid maternity leave and equal pay rates.
Meanwhile, the US government has
committed serious human rights violations on Cuban soil, including
torture, cruel treatment, and arbitrary detention at Guantanamo.
And since 1960, the United States has
expressly interfered with Cuba's economic rights and its right to
self-determination through the economic embargo.
The US embargo of Cuba, now a blockade,
was initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the Cold War
in response to a 1960 memo written by a senior State Department
official.
The memo proposed:
"a line of action that makes the
greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to
decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger,
desperation and the overthrow of the [Castro] government."
That goal has failed, but the punishing
blockade has made life difficult in Cuba.
In spite of that inhumane effort,
however, Cuba guarantees its people a remarkable panoply of human
rights:
Healthcare
Unlike in the United States,
healthcare is considered a right in Cuba.
Universal healthcare is free to all.
Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors to patients in the world
at 6.7 per 1,000 people. The 2014 infant mortality rate was 4.2
per 1,000 live births - one of the lowest in the world.
Healthcare in Cuba emphasizes
prevention, rather than relying only on medicine, partly due to
the limited access to medicines occasioned by the US blockade.
In 2014, the Lancet Journal said,
"If the accomplishments of Cuba
could be reproduced across a broad range of poor and
middle-income countries the health of the world's population
would be transformed."
Cuba has developed pioneering
medicines to treat and prevent lung cancer, and prevent diabetic
amputations.
Because of the blockade, however, we
in the United States cannot take advantage of them.
Education
Free education is a universal right
up to and including higher education.
Cuba spends a larger proportion of
its GDP on education than any other country in the world.
"Mobile teachers" are deployed to homes if children are unable
to attend school. Many schools provide free morning and
after-school care for working parents who have no extended
family.
It is free to train to be a doctor
in Cuba.
There are 22 medical schools in
Cuba, up from only 3 in 1959 before the Cuban Revolution.
Elections
Elections to Cuba's national
parliament (the National Assembly) take place every five years
and elections to regional Municipal Assemblies every 2.5 years.
Delegates to the National Assembly
then elect the Council of State, which in turn appoints the
Council of Ministers from which the President is elected.
As of 2018 (the date of the next
general election in Cuba), there will be a limit of no more than
two five-year terms for all senior elected positions, including
the President.
Anyone can be nominated to be a
candidate. It is not required that one be a member of the
Communist Party (CP). No money can be spent promoting candidates
and no political parties (including the CP) are permitted to
campaign during elections.
Military personnel are not on duty
at polling stations; school children guard the ballot boxes.
Labor Rights
Cuban law guarantees the right to
voluntarily form and join trade unions.
Unions are legally independent and
financially autonomous, independent of the CP and the state,
funded by members' subscriptions. Workers' rights protected by
unions include a written contract, a 40-44-hour week, and 30
days' paid annual leave in the state sector.
Unions have the right to stop work
they consider dangerous. They have the right to participate in
company management, to receive management information, to office
space and materials, and to facility time for representatives.
Union agreement is required for
lay-offs, changes in patterns of working hours, overtime, and
the annual safety report. Unions also have a political role in
Cuba and have a constitutional right to be consulted about
employment law.
They also have the right to propose
new laws to the National Assembly.
Women
Women make up the majority of Cuban
judges, attorneys, lawyers, scientists, technical workers,
public health workers and professionals.
Cuba is ranked first in Save the
Children's 'Lesser Developed Countries' Mother's Index. With
over 48% women MPs, Cuba has the third highest percentage of
female parliamentarians in the world.
Women receive 9 months of full
salary during paid maternity leave, followed by 3 months at 75%
of full salary.
The government subsidizes abortion
and family planning, places a high value on pre-natal care, and
offers 'maternity housing' to women before giving birth.
Life Expectancy
In 2013, the World Health
Organization listed life expectancy for,
The probability of dying between
ages 15 and 60 years per 1,000 people in the population was 115
for men and 73 for women in Cuba.
During the same period, life
expectancy for women in the United States was,
The probability of dying between 15
and 60 per 1,000 people was 128 for men and 76 for women in the
United States.
Death Penalty
A study by Cornell Law School found
no one under sentence of death in Cuba and no one on death row
in October 2015.
On December 28, 2010, Cuba's Supreme
Court commuted the death sentence of Cuba's last remaining death
row inmate, a Cuban-American convicted of a murder carried out
during a 1994 terrorist invasion of the island.
No new death sentences are known to
have been imposed since that time.
By contrast, as of January 1, 2016,
2,949 people were on death row in state facilities in the United
States. And 62 were on federal death row as of March 16, 2016,
according to Death Penalty Information.
Sustainable Development
In 2016, the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF), a leading global environmental organization, found that
Cuba was the only country in the world to have achieved
sustainable development.
Jonathan Loh, one of the
authors of the WWF report, said,
"Cuba has reached a good level
of development according to United Nations' criteria, thanks
to its high literacy level and a very high life expectancy,
while the ecological footprint is not large since it is a
country with low energy consumption."
Stop Lecturing
Cuba and Lift the Blockade
When Cuba and the US held talks about
human rights a year ago, Pedro Luis Pedroso, head of the
Cuban delegation, said:
"We expressed our concerns regarding
discrimination and racism patterns in US society, the worsening
of police brutality, torture acts and extrajudicial executions
in the fight on terror and the legal limbo of prisoners at the
US prison camp in Guantanamo."
The hypocrisy of the US
government in lecturing Cuba about its human rights while
denying many basic human rights to the American people is glaring.
The United States should lift the blockade.
Obama should close Guantanamo and return
it to Cuba...
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