Tag: Cuba

Cuba received widespread condemnation in early January when it implemented a ban on ordinary Cubans using the Internet.

Under a law that went into effect on January 18, 2004, only people with special authorization from the government will be allowed to have Internet access.

Technically, access to the Internet in Cuba has always required government permission, but as many as 40,000 people have skirted the law to obtain unofficial access to the INternet. The new law is an attempt to crack down on such access so that Cuba can more closely monitor who is using the Internet and for what purposes they are using it.

As Amnesty International noted in a press release about the change,

The new measures, which limit and impede unofficial internet use, constitute yet another attempt to cut off Cubans’ access to alternative views and a space for discussing them. This step, coming on top of last year’s prosecution of 75 activists for peacefully expressing their views, gives the authorities another mechanism for repressing dissent and punishing critics.

But to be fair to Cuba, the government said it only had its people’s best interests at heart. As Friends of Cuban Libraries noted in a press release, Cuban officials offered up a number of justifications of the new law, including this:

In a letter to a New Zealand newspaper (Scoop, January 24),
the Cuban ambassador, Miguel Ramirez, described Amnesty International’s protest
as “totally biased and full of prejudices according to the values of western
and developed countries…,” and he defended Cuba’s new law as a reasonable
measure to “regulate access to [the] Internet and avoid hackers, stealing
passwords, [and] access to pornographic, satanic cults, terrorist or other
negative sites…”

I can understand why they wouldn’t want people to have access to satanic sites, though — after all, Castro’s getting a bit old for that sort of competition.

Sources:

Cuban law prohibiting Internet access to take effect. UNWire, January 15, 2004.

Cuba Says Internet Ban Deters “Satanic Cults”. Press Release, Friends of Cuban Libraries, January 27, 2004.

Cuba: Further bans on freedom of expression. Press Release, Amnesty International, January 12, 2004.

Recently released statistics on the infant mortality rate in the Western hemisphere yielded an odd conclusions — Cuba’s infant mortality rate, 16 6.0 per 1,000, is now lower than the U.S. infant mortality rate, at 7.2 per 1,000. Given Cuba’s poverty level, its 6.0 rate is very impressive, but is it accurate to say that Cuba now has an infant mortality rate lower than the United States? No.

The problem is that international statistics on infant mortality are helpful in revealing large differences, but when it comes to small differences such as that between Cuba and the United States, often other factors are really behind the numbers.

The primary reason Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States is that the United States is a world leader in an odd category — the percentage of infants who die on their birthday. In any given year in the United States anywhere from 30-40 percent of infants die before they are even a day old.

Why? Because the United States also easily has the most intensive system of
emergency intervention to keep low birth weight and premature infants alive
in the world. The United States is, for example, one of only a handful countries that keeps detailed statistics on early fetal mortality — the survival rate of infants who are born as early as the 20th week of gestation.

How does this skew the statistics? Because in the United States if an infant is born weighing only 400 grams and not breathing, a doctor will likely spend lot of time and money trying to revive that infant. If the infant does not survive — and the mortality rate for such infants is in excess of 50 percent — that sequence of events will be recorded as a live birth and then a death.

In many countries, however, (including many European countries) such severe medical intervention would not be attempted and, moreover, regardless of whether or not it was, this would be recorded as a fetal death rather than a live birth. That unfortunate infant would never show up in infant mortality statistics.

This is clearly what is happening in Cuba. In the United States about 1.3 percent of all live births are very low birth weight — less than 1,500 grams. In Cuba, on the other hand, only about 0.4 percent of all births are less than 1,500 grams. This is despite the fact that the United States and Cuba have very similar low birth rates (births where the infant weighs less than 2500g). The United States actually has a much better low birth rate than Cuba if you control for multiple births — i.e. the growing number of multiple births in the United States due to technological interventions has resulted in a marked increase in the number of births under 2,500 g.

It is odd if both Cuba and the U.S. have similar birth weight distributions that the U.S. has more than 3 times the number of births under 1,500g, unless there is a marked discrepancy in the way that very low birth weight births are recorded. Cuba probably does much the same thing that many other countries do and does not register births under 1000g. In fact, this is precisely what the World Health Organization itself recommends that for official record keeping purposes, only live births of greater than 1,000g should be included.

The result is that the statistics make it appear as if Cuba’s infant mortality rate is significantly better than the United States’, but in fact what is really being measured in this difference is that the United States takes far more serious (and expensive) interventions among extremely low birth weight and extremely premature infants than Cuba (or much of the rest of the world for that matter) does.

This does not diminish in any way Cuba’s progress on infant mortality, which is one of the few long term improvements that the Cuban state has made, but infant mortality statistics that are that close to one another are often extremely difficult to compare cross-culturally.