Originally published at Resumen
Recent data shows that between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy (LE) in the US plunged almost three years while for Cuba it edged up 0.2 years. Yet, in 1960, the year after its revolution, Cuba had a LE of 64.2 years, lower by 5.6 years than that in the US (69.8 years). As I document in Cuban Health Care, the island quickly caught up to the US and, from 1970 through 2016, the two countries were nip and tuck, with some years Cuba and other years the US, having a longer LE. But neither country was ever as much as one year of LE ahead of the other.
Life Expectancy (LE) in US and Cuba, 2017-2021
| Year | LE US | LE Cuba | US – Cuba |
| 2021 | 76.1* | 79.0‡ | – 2.9 |
| 2020 | 78.8† | 78.9‡ | – 0.1 |
| 2019 | 79.0* | 78.8‡ | + 0.2 |
| 2018 | 78.7† | 78.7‡ | 0.0 |
| 2017 | 78.6† | 78.6‡ | 0.0 |
This continued through the beginning of Covid, which sharply changed the pattern. LE in the US suddenly dropped behind that in Cuba. Bernd Debusmann Jr .of BBC News wrote, LE in the US fell “to the lowest level seen since 1996. Government data showed LE at birth now stands at 76.1 compared to 79 in 2019. That is the steepest two-year decline in a century.” From 2019 to 2020, “LE declined in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
How could a country with all the problems of Cuba, actually have LE almost three years greater than the US?
The Covid Contrast
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data confirmed that “Covid-19 was the main contributing factor [to changes in LE]. Between 2019 and 2020, the pandemic contributed to 74% of the decline.”
A critical divergence is that Cuba guarantees health care to all as a human right while the US system is based on profit and political grandstanding. When Covid hit, the US dawdled for months as Cuba mobilized for medical action.
Each day Cuban medical students knocked on doors to ask citizens how they were. Students’ tasks included obtaining survey data from residents and making extra visits to the elderly, infants and those with respiratory problems. Medical data was used by those in the highest decision-making positions of the country. Every Cuban citizen and every health care worker, from those at neighborhood doctor offices through those at research institutes, had a part in determining health policy.
This inclusive approach resulted in Cuba’s having 87 Covid deaths by July 21, 2020, when the US had experienced 140,300. While the US population is 30 times that of Cuba, it had 1613 times as many deaths.
In Addition to Covid
News stories also mentioned other factors associated with the shorter LE in the US: drug overdoses, heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis and suicides. The corporate press acknowledged racial disparities.
The fall in US life expectancy was even more pronounced among Native Americans and Alaska Natives. Since 2019, it “dropped by 6.6 years, more than twice that of the wider US population.”
The US has multiple groups who reject government attempts to vaccinate or wear masks. Most loud-mouthed, of course, are the right wingers who lividly despise the very idea of public health campaigns. While their thought processes are hallucination-based, people of color have reality-based fears of being ignored, lied to, and used for government experimentation, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
What They Did Not Look At
Among factors with increasing US Covid rates ignored by corporate media in the US are poverty, misinformation, abortion, the embargo against Cuba and preparation for climate change.
Poverty. The first tasks of the Cuban revolution were to simultaneously address poverty, food, sanitation, literacy, education, racism and housing, which the rebels saw as parts of unitary whole. During the Covid crisis, many US corporations were determined to force low wage workers to stay at their jobs, spreading the disease. Cuba told those with Covid to stay home.
Misinformation. Discussions of Covid deaths must not ignore the deadly role of science denial. At the same time Trump was foolishly downplaying mounting dangers of Covid, Cuba was far along developing its “Novel Coronavirus Plan for Prevention and Control.” Trump was not and is not an isolated individual – he manifests a life-threatening movement toward lunacy.
Abortion. Cuba also does not have a “Women’s Lives Don’t Matter!” movement seeking to eliminate abortion rights. Those who do not want an abortion do not get one and people do not seek to impose their religious beliefs on others. The Supreme Court’s allowing states to criminalize abortion will cause many women to die, due both from self-attempts at abortion and lack of its availability.
Embargo. The “embargo” has a special relationship with LE in Cuba: one might expect it to decrease LE; but it has not done so. When Cuba was reeling from the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, the US passed laws intending to punish those who continued to trade with it. Yet, due to its prioritizing health care during the 1990s, Cuba’s infant mortality decreased while its LE showed a slight increase.
International solidarity movements have stepped in to help Cuba overcome many embargo effects. Lack of essential material prevented Cuba from performing liver transplants in children. But, during May 2022, Puentes de Amor (Bridges of Love) delivered the vital chemical compound to the William Soler Pediatric Hospital.
Resilience. In March 2022 (p. 8) Scientific American editors wrote that most important in preparing for the next pandemic is “building new systems.” Unfortunately, this is what the US avoids as it becomes absorbed in making minor tweaks to outmoded, inadequate systems of environmental protection.
Cuba also employs agroecology, biodigesters, and vastly expanded vegetable production. This is why Jason Hickel’s “Sustainable Development Index” rated Cuba’s ecological efficiency as the best in the world in 2019.
Where Are We Headed?
By 2017, Cuba had become the only country with a government-led plan (Project Life, or Tarea Vida) to combat climate change which includes a 100 year projection. While Cuba is looking ahead and planning how to protect people from increasingly devastating storms, US politicians feverishly bury their heads in the sand.
This causes LE in the US to plunge down while LE in Cuba climbs slowly upward. Covid did not create the LE divide between the US and Cuba. Covid exacerbated trends which have become increasingly intertwined for decades.
Don Fitz is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought, where a version of this article originally appeared. He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor. His book, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, has been available since June 2020.
