healthcare in Cuba by Ilker Belek

I'm borrowing a book about the health care system in Cuba that I am borrowing from the Jose Marti Friendship association, and it is like reading some sort of futuristic sci-fi utopian novel. when the Cuban government was suffering from agricultural shortages, it started an Urban agriculture which raised fruit and vegetable production by 1000% between 1994-2006. There is an emphasis on equality at the class level between urban and rural areas in terms of access to healthcare. Coordination and decentralization. They have elections for national, regional, and municipal healthcare councils. (aspiring hospital administrators who play guitar on the side shiver in their labcoats). The book also stresses (although not with much extra effort) that these successes are due to the socialist formation of their healthcare system. Motivation is a looming problem for the system but sure as shit better than the alternative. It reminded me of my favorite reading experience of alllllllll time.

our objective is to eliminate ghettos. Therefore, the only valid policy with respect to this objective is to eliminate the conditions which give rise to the truth of this theory. The simplest approach here is to eliminate those mechanisms which serve to generate this theory. The mechanism in this case is very simple- competitive bidding for the use of the land. if we eliminate this mechanism, we will presumably eliminate the result. This is immediately suggestive of a policy for eliminating ghettos, which would presumably supplant competitive bidding with a socially controlled urban land market and socialized control of the housing sector. Under such a system, the Von Thunen theory (which is a normative theory anyways) would become empirically irrelevant to our understanding of the spatial structure of residential land use. This approach has been tried in a number of countries. In cuba, for example, all urban flats were expropriated in 1960. Rents were paid to the government "and were considered as amoritzation towards ownership by the occupants".
This approach to the ghetto land and housing market is suggestive of a different framework for analyzing problems and devising solutions. Notice, for example, that all old housing became rent free. If we regard the total housing stock of an urban area as a social (as opposed to private) good, then obviously the community has already paid for the old housing. We have an enormous quantity of social capital locked up in the housing stock, but in a private market system for land and housing, the value of the housing is not always measured in terms of its use as a shelter and residence, but in terms of the amount received in market exchange. In many inner city areas at the present time, houses patently posses little or no exchange value. This does not mean, however, that they have no use value. As a consequence, we are throwing away use value because we cannot establish exchange value. This waste would not occur under a socialized housing market system and it is one of the costs we bear for clinging tenaciously to the notion of private property.


So many people are dying in America because an exchange value cannot be established for fixing them. Stupidest shit ever. Viva Cuba.