Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

It's propaganda, but it still points to a system of perverse incentives that the Cuban Government should address. My parents took a bicycling trip to Cuba a number of years ago. Their guide had a wife who was a doctor. He made ~20x what she did because he earned his money by serving foreigners. So in a country that tries to make everyone equal, there are still tiers of wealth and the people in the upper tiers are the ones who are arguably doing the least valuable work for their society.

Note that this is a problem not limited to communist countries like Cuba. In America, in particular, we have this problem when it comes to our teachers. Teaching the next generation is one of the most important jobs we have and, yet, the pay is so low that the best people for the job are disincentivized to go into that profession. When a hedge fund manager managing teacher pensions out-earns an entire school faculty who are invested in his fund while underperforming the S&P, we too have a problem.

I think everyone working an honest job should be payed pretty well (not sure what you mean about 'relative to the supply'), at least enough to have a good life, for sure. Is it too much to ask that everyone have enough to live a good life? Who doesn't deserve a good life because of their occupation? Nobody.

I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes (except that in the U.S. they have to pay back exceptionally high student loans for the first decade-ish, of course).

Cuban education lacks major cost components like practice/internship insurance and U.S. level income healthcare professionals in the teaching: their professors are also paid $30/mo. They also have no top-tier equipment, use run-down facilities, don't stick to expensive regulations and protocols and (if their communism is anything like communism of the place I grew up) most likely employ the students for all kind of maintenance chores. I'd put it at $20k tops for 6 year curriculum, and that's being on very generous side.

>Succeed at what? What success do they gain from being a doctor in a country which prevents them from being rewarded for it?

I would say the success of being a doctor at all but it seems that to you success is purely a function of wealth. In that case these people could have left Cuba before using it's free education. It's highly hypocritical to use all the benefits of the Cuban system and then be upset when you also have to help pay into it.

>It may surprise you, but it is hard work to be a doctor.

Nope, I totally get that.

>with a government which was built on tricking peasant farmers into willing their land to a psychopathic dictator who killed everyone who got in his way.

Oh lord, put the overreaction away. How many words do you think I would have to change in this sentence to make it reflect America's founding relation between wealthy British WASPs and native americans?

>The conditions they work under have every feature of slavery, even if the clothes they put on look professional.

I understand you don't like communism but really the hyperbole man... and shame on you for trivializing slavery. These doctors all knew what the Cuban system was, they chose to use Cuba's excellent medical education program which is provided for free and which can only be provided, again, for free because it taxes it's citizens heavily and now that they have received that benefit, want to rescind on it's price.

>A 34 y/o American doctor, even if they are somehow still paying off school, had the personal opportunity to take on that burden.

Ah but how many Americans really get a shot at medical school?

In the most recent year for which quintile census data are available, more than three-quarters of medical students came from families in the top two quintiles of family income. [0]

And you should check that citation, Figure 2 is particularly damning. Essentially, these Cuban doctors face the reality that had they been born in the United States there is a significant percentage of them that never would have had a shot at attending medical school in the first place.

You could also take a look at the Wired article[1] that I found that linked from, it's about how poor American students are actually going to Cuba for education. In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative:

Most of the school’s American graduates go into family medicine, internal medicine, or pediatrics—all fields facing major doctor shortages and all fields on the low end of the doctor pay scale.[1]

Thanks Cuba!

>Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, takes on the burden of training you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, spends their entire life paying it off.

Can I just change the framing of this a little bit, tell me what you think:

Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, chips in to train you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, continues to chip in to train the next generation of doctors.

[0] https://www.aamc.org/download/102338/data/aibvol8no1.pdf

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medi...

You sometimes find threads full of libertarians too, it's weird...