The Wall Street Journal magazine falls for Communist Cuban propaganda about how it's better in Havana than Florida. Under the headline "Cuba Is Staying Strong," the Journal reports:
As world travel began to close down in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, Collin Laverty had to make a snap decision: Miami or Havana? For an American who divides his time between the two cities as he runs Cuba Educational Travel, an agency that in less restricted times counted U.S. senators and tech-world luminaries among its clientele, the choice was obvious. "I felt the Cubans were going to do a better job," he explained by phone from Havana. "It would be safer here."
Laverty has been proved right. As the situation has deteriorated this summer in Florida—a population of 21.5 million with nearly 10,000 deaths, or 46 per 100,000 people—the Cuban island of 11.3 million people had by mid-August clocked 88 deaths, or less than one death per 100,000. Despite the occasional small outbreak in the provinces, the island was reporting many days with either zero new cases or few enough to count on one hand.
Cuba's success was the result of a textbook response: Health authorities (who had been in constant dialogue with the World Health Organization since January) locked down the country, froze international flights, conducted widespread testing, isolation and tracing and enforced the wearing of masks, a process undoubtedly made easier in an authoritarian system...Although Cuba's health-care system is plagued by chronic shortages, the capacity of its medical workforce has served it well during the pandemic. Cuba has the highest percentage of doctors per capita of any country in the world, and they are trained for rapid community response to hurricanes and other natural disasters. "You had doctors and nurses in lab coats knocking on your door once or twice a day, checking in," says Laverty.
We're really supposed to believe health statistics, or any official numbers, coming from a Communist government? If it's really so much better in Havana, where are the boatloads of people fleeing Miami to return to Cuba? And we're supposed to believe a lead anecdote from a guy whose business exists at the sufferance of the Communist government and only will grow if Americans perceive Cuba as a socialist paradise rather than a Stalinist hellhole? This is the sort of article that, if it appeared in the New York Times magazine, the Wall Street Journal would be making fun of it, and rightfully so. It's as if Herbert Matthews' ghost has taken leave of the New York Times and taken up residence instead at the WSJ., as the Journal calls its glossy magazine.
