Study Criticizes ‘Virtual’ Medical Embargo on Cuba

The federal government has published “cooked statistics” exaggerating the amount of medicines and medical equipment that American companies have shipped to Cuba, according to a soon-to-be-published report by a Florida physician researching the ban on trade with the impoverished island nation.

The new analysis goes to the heart of the controversy surrounding the 36-year economic embargo, which Congress tightened in 1992 and 1996. Although the policy prohibits U.S. companies and foreign subsidiaries from selling food and other products to Cuba, it allows sales of medical supplies on humanitarian grounds. A supplier must obtain a special trade license and ensure that goods are not distributed to the Cuban military or otherwise diverted, among other requirements.

Supporters of the embargo say it does not threaten the health of the Cuban people and point to the medical exemption as evidence. In May, a U.S. State Department report on “myth versus reality” in the embargo debate said that 36 license applications have been granted to U.S.-based companies to sell medical products to Cuba since 1992. The government “routinely” issues such licenses, the fact sheet says.

But that figure is disputed by Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick, an anesthesiologist at the University of South Florida and a vociferous critic of the embargo. After double-checking with the Treasury and Commerce departments, which provided the data to the State Department, he says only 19 such licenses have been granted since then.

That lower number indicates how seldom U.S. companies ship medicines to Cuba, Kirkpatrick said, suggesting that the embargo is a “virtual” medical ban. Also, it shows how the U.S. government tries to play down the embargo’s “devastating effects” on Cubans’ health, he said. His analysis is scheduled to appear in next month’s Canadian Medical Assn. Journal.

For its part, the State Department says it is looking into Kirkpatrick’s report. “If there is an error,” a spokesperson said, “we’ll correct it.”

Meanwhile, the department says that any decline in Cubans’ health results from the Castro government’s mismanagement and a failing economy, which was crippled by the demise of the Soviet Union, its leading trade partner. In addition, says the fact sheet, the country has invested in its military and “internal security apparatus” at the expense of health care services, while creating a system of “medical apartheid” that coddles party and government officials and deprives the “health care system used by the vast majority of Cubans of adequate funding.”

Typical of the vertiginous, highly charged debate on the embargo, the State Department’s report in May was itself a response to a study by the American Assn. for World Health, a Washington-based group affiliated with the World Health Organization.

In a 300-page report released in March, the group concluded that the embargo is “causing significant suffering and death” in Cuba. Deaths from waterborne infections more than doubled from 1989 to 1995, partly because of embargo-worsened shortages of water-purification chemicals, the report says, and the heart disease death rate increased about 5%. In one case, it reported, a heart patient needing an implantable defibrillator made by a U.S. firm died months after the U.S. rejected the firm’s application to ship the device.

The research team of U.S., Canadian, and Grenadan physicians and lawyers documented shortages of numerous medical supplies controlled by U.S.-based companies, including drugs for treating AIDS and childhood cancer.