For years, we have been told that Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. In other words, their babies survive at a higher rate than American babies.
Those Cuban statistics have been cited to promote the Cuban models for both medical schools and health care clinics. They’ve been offered as reasons to support socialized medicine. They’ve even been offered as a defense for other shortcomings of the Cuban government.
That’s a message that people can appreciate. It’s impactful.
Cuba’s success with its health care system, however, seems inconsistent with everything else we know about the nation. International human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have frequently accused Cuba of arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials, and other human rights violations. The laws of that nation restrict the press, free speech, assembly, and movement. Moreover, Cuba has serious economic problems.
Gross domestic product (GDP) measures the national income and output for a given country’s economy. It’s equal to the total expenditures for all final goods and services produced within that country in a given time period. Cuba’s GDP dropped by one-third with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Venezuela propped it up for a while, but now, that support is gone. Cuba regularly faces shortages of all kinds. Energy shortages are common. Frequent electricity outages and low fuel supplies mean that delivery of all kinds of consumer goods, from canned vegetables to toilet paper, is hampered.
According to Gonzalez, Cuban early neonatal deaths are often reported as late fetal deaths. In other words, the births aren’t counted. That has the effect of artificially reducing the IMR. He estimates that Cuba’s true IMR in 2004, for instance, was much higher than the reported 5.8. He puts it between 7.45 and 11.46, far higher than the number in the United States or other developed countries.
Health care and child mortality rates certainly were part of the ideological battle between the superpowers during the Cold War. During the 1970s, for instance, the Soviets saw a significant growth in infant mortality rates, which affected overall life expectancy as well. This was a blow to propaganda efforts for the Kremlin and its apologists.
Similar concerns could shape reporting today.
Concurring with other observers, Lyon also concluded that Cuban doctors were “far likelier than ours to count newborns who die on their day of birth as a fetal death.” Both of those facts can skew the numbers, but this might be seen as a legitimate difference in categorization. Some other factors are more clearly intended as disinformation.
It’s true, of course, that in some countries, doctors don’t work as hard to save babies born very prematurely (say, prior to 24 weeks) or with severe birth defects. U.S. doctors, on the other hand, often go to extraordinary lengths to try to save these lives even when the outlook is bleak. Often, such children don’t have much of a chance to survive. When they die, that death adds to the totals and contributes to the misleading comparison between American and Cuban IMRs.
Americans are just starting to learn about disinformation. When you see a tweet or a post that seems inconsistent with what you already know, especially when it can be traced to a suspect source, you need to do a bit of work to see whether the claims hold up.
The claim about Cuba’s health care system and its IMR is one of those things that seems inconsistent with what we already know. It also can be traced to suspect sources. On closer investigation, it may not hold up very well.
At the very least, we ought not be making decisions about our nation’s future based upon that information.