UNSURPRISING: Cuba Manipulating Health Care Statistics.

Dr. Rodolfo Stusser, former adviser to the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, said in an email that the ministry has contrived its health data since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Stusser conducted his own personal research on Cuba’s health care system since 1800, but has been unable to review more data in recent years. Officials at Cuba’s Health Statistics Bureau told him in 2009 that old archives had been lost in a fire.

Stusser presented research [PDF] last year to the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) showing that declining infant and gross mortality rates predated Castro’s takeover. However, health care successes in Cuba’s colonial and republican eras “have been systematically erased or distorted,” he said in the report. . . .

Doctors in Cuba’s public health system are pressured to induce abortions for potentially problematic pregnancies in order to artificially lower the infant mortality rate. Stusser estimated that if the deaths of living fetuses older than 21 weeks had been reported, Cuba’s infant mortality rate would be at least 50 percent higher.