Healthcare and Repression

Cuba's record after the revolution is genuinely two-sided. The island built a public health system with more doctors per person than many rich countries, and a mass teaching campaign in 1961 lifted literacy to about 96 percent in a single year, with the rate climbing past 99 percent in the decades that followed. Those gains were real.

They came at a price: one-party rule, no free press, and political prisoners held for years.

The cost was steep. Over the decades Cuba jailed thousands of political prisoners and allowed no independent press, no free unions, and no opposition parties. Human rights groups counted hundreds still behind bars for political reasons in recent years. Cuba calls them criminals, not prisoners of conscience.