The Cuban doctors are here. Ahead of the arrival, Citizen TV aired a documentary on healthcare in Cuba on Sunday May 27 titled “The Cuban dose.”
The aim of the documentary was to give viewers an understanding of how Cuba has succeeded in its universal health care programmes.
Now, the thing with Kenyan journalism is that it is full of description and little explanation.
The Citizen TV documentary described how Cubans can get the best medical attention across the road from home, how medics go to see patients at home, the low numbers of infant and maternal mortality, how all of that is free of charge, etcetera.
We have nothing against description per se. It is important to understand what. But that is not all. The Citizen documentary was a lost opportunity to tell why.
Health care, education and whatever else Cuba has achieved is solidly built on Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution that overthrew the US-backed tyrant Fulgencio Batista and created a socialist state.
Castro’s close ally (beside his brother, immediate former President Raul) was the Argentinian guerrilla strategist Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Che was a medical doctor and would later play key roles in the revolutionary government in Havana.
Without understanding this, Citizen TV misled their viewers to imagine Cuba’s system could be easily replicated in Kenya. As far as we know, revolution is not on the horizon here. The word itself scares people. You can’t reproduce the Cuban health system under Kenya’s man-eat-man capitalism.
The Cuba constitution established “a socialist State of workers, independent and sovereign, organized with all and for the good of all, as a unitary and democratic republic, for the enjoyment of political freedom, social justice, individual and collective welfare and human solidarity.”
The constitution guarantees that “no man or woman who is able to work will not have the opportunity to find a job with which to contribute to the goals of the society and to the satisfaction of their own needs; there will be no person incapacitated for work who will not have adequate means of subsistence; there will be no sick person who will not have medical care.”
It stipulates there will be no child who will not have school, food and clothing; no young person who will not have the opportunity to study; no person who will not have access to study, culture and sports.
Citizen TV’s documentary made no mention of the fact that Cuba has made all the great strides despite a US economic blockade lasting nearly 60 years and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the island’s closest ideological ally.
But ideology is not something Kenyan journalists highlight in their reports, that is, the ideas upon which society is organised. Scribes seem to think transformation will come from nebulous concepts like “political will” and elite pacts such as the famous handshake. That, sorry, is political jargon for business as usual.
And what was the point of sending a team all the way to Cuba to report about that country’s health system yet some of the people interviewed for the documentary were Health CS Sicily Kariuki and Isiolo Governor Mohammed Kuti?
Of course they kept talking about Kenya having the “political will” to transform healthcare to the standard of Cuba.
Citizen TV either did not bother to find out or, for some reason, chose to ignore the revolutionary politics behind Cuba’s celebrated health system. And now that we have some Cuban doctors around, people might imagine the medics’ magic would rub off on us so that by the time they leave we would be on course to building a system like theirs.
Not in a million years!
