Reply #2: Cuba spends more money on education than the U.S.!

[Peace Patriot]

Cuba’s education index ... equal(s) (the) highest in the world, along with Australia, Finland, Denmark and New Zealand. Cuba’s education index is 0.993 of a possible score of 1.

(Cuba's) adult literacy rate is 99.8% and school enrolments are 100%. Public expenditure on education in Cuba is 14.2% of total government expenditure. This is higher than Australia (13.3%) and the US (13.7%) .

Cuba tops the world in the ratio of female to male enrolment in primary, secondary and tertiary education, at 121%.

Cuba’s life expectancy is 78.5 years, the highest along with Chile in Latin America and the Caribbean. It compares favourably with Australia (81.4 years) and the US (79.1 years).

While Cuba ranks at or near the top in health and education measures, its low GDP per capita, the third element of the HDI, reduces its HDI score. With GDP included, the report ranks Cuba 51st overall in the overall HDR ranking.

Cuba is ranked 95th in the world in GDP per capita. The gap between its low GDP ranking and much higher overall HDI ranking reveals its human development is significantly higher than its GDP per capita might indicate.

The difference between these two rankings can be seen as a measure of the efficiency of converting a nation’s income into the health and education of its people. Cuba heads the world in this category, by a wide margin.

For example, Mexico has more than double Cuba’s GDP, but has a lower HDI. The US is ranked nine in GDP per capita but falls to 13 in HDI ranking, demonstrating a relatively poor conversion of its wealth into health and education for its people.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/816/41981

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In other words, with far fewer resources, Cuba achieves far superior results in education and health care. It's possible to have excellent education and health care with everyone living modest lifestyles--no $600 million salaries/bonuses for CEOs, no humungous private corporations pushing the latest unnecessary goo-gaws or poisoned foods on the populace with billions of dollars of propaganda, no mega-corps, monopolies and extremely corrupting lobbyists, no "globalisation" (job-killing, ocean-polluting, sweatshop labor promoting cheap imports), no second yachts and third mansions, no corporate resource wars--revenues sufficient for a decent, low-impact life for everyone, but not for greedbag hoarding, gambling and killing.

Forcing the extremely rich and the privileged to share has resulted in horrors that we wouldn't want to see repeated--in Stalinist Russia, eastern Europe and Maoist China--but not in Cuba, which has developed a uniquely Cuban form of communism that has survived, while the big communist systems crumbled, because it is different--more democratic, more humane and arguably more genuine (truer to the ideals of the earliest communists). I've sometimes thought that communism in places like Russia took on the character of prior tyrannies because Russians had never experienced anything else and were very isolated from European and American democracies.

Cuban communism, however, was born right next to the "land of the free, home of the brave," and--much like Vietnam--was influenced by our revolution and democratic progress (the labor movement, the women's suffragist movement, the anti-slavery movement, the civil rights movement), and also by the original Bolivarian revolutions that freed Latin America from Spain and Portugal, and the Haitian revolution. It was born with notions of freedom in the air. It has never had gulags and forced labor camps. Cubans wouldn't put up with that. It has been ruled by a more or less benevolent dictator (I think "benevolent monarch" is the right phrase), possibly necessary because of how much danger Cuba has been in, from the corpo-fascist anti-democrats of the US, throughout its history. Not a mad Stalin, however. Nor a 'Big Brother' Mao. More a "philosopher king" type, who holds the country together with something that closely resembles "consent of the people" and is arguably more democratic than our system has become--now run by oiligarchs and war profiteers and banksters.

We could learn from Cuba--something our Overlords very much don't want us to do. Study the good parts, sort out of the bad--reject some things, experiment with others--like a free people should be able to. Statistics like those in this UN Human Development Report 2009 don't get trumpeted by our corpo-fascist press, and they do everything they can to unjustly demonize Cuba. They don't want us to know that you can have excellent education and health care with low GDP. It's only when the rich loot us all that these things are "unaffordable."