Harkin Brags About How Free and Good Socialist Cuba's Medicine Is; Rubio Decimates Harkin On the Senate Floor

HARKIN:  When a woman gets pregnant in Cuba, she gets visited immediately, well, soon as they know about it. She gets visited by a nurse. She gets visited by health officials who put her on a better diet, make sure she doesn't smoke, provide supportive services for her during her pregnancy, make sure that there's someone there for the birth, and that child is -- everything is just covered from the earliest time of pregnancy through early childhood.

HARKIN:  Every one of these students are going to medical school, and you know what it costs them?  Zero.  Not one cent.  The 108 students that are there, pay nothing.  We have over 90 graduates of this school back here in America right now.  And that's another thing, whenever we traveled all over Cuba, I went to the clinics, and I talked to health people, I'd always ask them, "What did it cost you to go to the school? Do you have student debt?"  No.  Medical school is free.  There is no cost to going to medical school.  None whatsoever.

~Rush Limbaugh- partial transcript of Harkin's love affair with Cuba

Marc Rubio, who's parents came from Cuba, responds on the Senate Floor to the propaganda from Harkin hailing the socialist/communist dictator nation of Cuba...Here is the video and part of the transcript (to go Hot Air for the whole thing). It's totally worth watching.



 Excerpts of the transcript from Hot Air:

I wonder if our visitors to Cuba were informed that in Cuba, any time there is any sort of problem with the child in utero they are strongly encouraged to undergo abortions, and that’s why they have an abortion rate that skyrockets, and some say, is perhaps the highest the world. I heard him also talk about these great doctors that they have in Cuba. I have no doubt they’re very talented. I’ve met a bunch of them. You know where I met them? In the United States because they defected. Because in Cuba, doctors would rather drive a taxi cab or work in a hotel than be a doctor. I wonder if they spoke to him about the outbreak of cholera that they’ve been unable to control, or about the three-tiered system of health care that exists where foreigners and government officials get health care much better than that that’s available to the general population.

I also heard him speak about baseball and I know that Cubans love baseball, since my parents were from there and I grew up in a community surrounded by it. He talked about these great baseball players that are coming from Cuba — and they are. But I wonder if they informed him — in fact, I bet you they didn’t talk about those players to him because every single one of those guys playing in the Major Leagues defected. They left Cuba to play here....

I heard about their wonderful literacy rate, how everyone in Cuba knows how to read. That’s fantastic. Here’s the problem: they can only read censored stuff. They’re not allowed access to the Internet. The only newspapers they’re allowed to read are Granma or the ones produced by the government.

I wish that someone on that trip would have asked the average Cuban, ‘With your wonderful literacy skills, are you allowed to read The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or any blog, for that matter?’ Because the answer’s, ‘No.’ So it’s great to have literacy, but if you don’t have access to the information, what’s the point of it? So I wish somebody would have asked about that on that trip. 

Let me tell you what the Cubans are really good at, because they don’t know how to run their economy, they don’t know how to build, they don’t know how to govern a people. What they are really good at is repression. What they are really good at is shutting off information to the Internet and to radio and television and social media. That’s what they’re really good at. And they’re not just good at it domestically, they’re good exporters of these things. And you want to see exhibit A, B, C and D? I’m going to show them to you right now. They have exported repression in real-time, in our hemisphere, right now.

I listen to this stuff about Cuba and I listen to what’s happening in Venezuela, they’re very similar. Not just in the repression part, but the economics part. You know Venezuela’s an oil-rich country with hardworking people? They have a shortage — we don’t have an embargo against Venezuela. They have a shortage of toilet paper and tooth paste. Why? Because they are incompetent. Because communism doesn’t work. They look more and more like Cuba economically and politically every single day.

~End quote. More here where he deals with the abortion, political martyrs, etc.