I must vehemently disagree with my temporary ex-neighbor and good friend Kim Learnard, and with Don McAdam’s letter about our healthcare being no better than Cuba — give me a break!

Born in Cuba, raised in Venezuela, I arrived in the U.S. to attend New York Military Academy in 1952, and then Georgia Tech. I can vouch for what the pre-Castro regime health care was like. My father, a Dutch mechanical engineer, had several kidney stones removed in Cuba in 1948 by the wonderful doctors that treated and operated on him. When they X-rayed him for the first time they had a surprise: my father had four kidneys.

My father trusted the Cuban doctors because he worked in Cuba since 1920. In those days if you lived in Cuba you could buy healthcare with total coverage for 9 pesos or dollars monthly from private companies and hospitals. My father had one stone removed from one side and then 48 days later he had another stone on the other side.

The doctors of that time were some of the best in the American continent and I still remember the X-ray doctor that was so good at reading and diagnosing problems that he would travel to the U.S. to read films.

In April of 1958 I went to Cuba to try to get my inheritance from my mother, who had liquidated everything in Venezuela and had moved to Cuba. I left there in Sept. 22 of 1959 with not a dime from the $259,000 in 1959 dollars that was my inheritance.

In 1969 my life’s dream of becoming an American citizen came through and my love for this wonderful country is so great that as the years went by I saw a tendency to depend on the government that worried me greatly because I knew that 50 years ago while stranded in Cuba I saw the change that Castro forced on the Cuban people.

If you are a tourist, you can get great healthcare but you have to pay in U.S. dollars. If you are a Cuban, you are not allowed to get the tourists’ care nor go to any other hospital than the one government tells you to.

In Cuba a doctor’s salary is the equivalent of $40 monthly! That was the reason to motivated me to have a website to expose the horrors that the Cuban people are going through and why they are willing to get in a tire tube and float to the U.S.

Here is the link to my site for everyone that thinks socialized medicine is the way to go: www.gerardjansen.com/Cubainfo.htm.

Once there, make sure on the first link to look for “Free Healthcare?” And see just not words but pictures of what 50 years of Communism have done to a nation once called the pearl of the Antilles, a country with no foreign debt, and exporting all kinds of products.

If you want to see what is going in Iran, Venezuela, Colombia, and our border with Mexico, go here: www.gerardjansen.com/opinion.htm.

My fellow Americans, please wake up.

Gerard Jansen

gtm@gerardjansen.com

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