It well-known that Cuba has an impressive healthcare system and does not particularly need to be cited unless specific claims are made. Cuba is famous, for instance, for exporting doctors to other nations.
The same applies for Iceland. Nurses keep striking, doctors call for more funding, health care experts keep complaining about lack of facilities. Yet Iceland has one of the best health care system in the world.
Be it a capitalist country like Iceland or a socialist like Cuba, with enough funding and an educated workforce you can run a pretty successful healthcare system, despite the fact that it could be better. And perhaps that is precisely why the workers in a successful healthcare system complain. They are educated enough to know how it could be improved even further.
The articles are about Cuban doctors complaining about their working conditions and compensation as they are sent abroad. You used them as a way to answer your parent, who’s central claim was that that it is a well known fact that Cuba’s health care system is good actually. They provide the fact that Cuba exports doctors as an example of how successful their healthcare system is.
To me it sounded like you were using the fact that doctors complain about their working condition as evidence against parent’s claim. So it felt natural to explain that a healthcare system can be successful despite the fact that the workers in said system have complaints about it.
Ideally these workers should be paid a fair share for their labor (particularly when their boss—the Cuban Government—claims to be a socialist). But regrettably that is not the world we live in. I wouldn’t be surprised—if the numbers were crunched—that a doctor employed by a for profit hospital in a capitalist country also only received a tenth to a quarter of the profits they generate, after their bosses take their profits and their governments take their taxes.
Most of the reports I've read about Cuba's healthcare metrics are heavily reliant on trusting data released by the Cuban government (particularly around life expectancy and infant mortality), not subject to independent audit. Haven't looked closely at the sources in your citation, though.
No: NGOs, academia, a free press... None of these to my knowledge are able to operate in Cuba with what most of us would consider trustable autonomy from the government in publishing information that constitutes an independent research.
In any case, here is a short paper showing Cuba's healthcare outcomes are comparable to Canada and US: https://globalhealth.washington.edu/sites/default/files/50%2...