Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
133
long persist as the Nixon-Kissinger destabilization policy, designed to
“make the economy scream,” in Nixon’s words, had its effects, along
with other factors. 97
Similarly, US policy towards Cuba is readily explained by the Quality
of Life Index of the Overseas Development Council, which places Cuba
well above any other Latin American country and approximately equal to
the US—actually better than the US if we consider its more egalitarian
character, thus with lower infant mortality rates than Chicago and far
lower rates than the Navajo reservation. Tom Farer of the Rutgers Law
School, member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of
the OAS and former State Department assistant for Inter-American
Affairs, writes that:
. . . there is a consensus among scholars of a wide variety of
ideological positions that, on the level of life expectancy,
education, and health, Cuban achievement is considerably greater
than one would expect from its level of per capita income. A
recent study of 113 Third World countries in terms of these basic
indicators of popular welfare ranked Cuba first, ahead even of
Taiwan—which is probably the outstanding example of growth
with equity within a capitalist economic framework. Data in the
1981 World Development Report of the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development also support the consensus.
Cuba excelled according to all main indicators of human needs
satisfaction . . . What has changed remarkably is not so much the
gross indicators as those that reflect the changed conditions of the
poor, particularly the rural poor. In 1958, for example, the one
rural hospital in the entire country represented about 2 percent of
the hospital facilities in Cuba; by 1982 there were 117 hospitals,