LavenderRed_Cubabook

Capitalism and contraception
The years of sex education that preceded the outbreak of the epidemic helped to create
the basis for a more scientific and compassionate approach to people with AIDS.
However, when faced with a sexually transmissible epidemic like AIDS, Cuba had to
overcome a particular capitalist legacy regarding safer-sex education and practices.
Dr. Celestino Álvarez Lajonchere, a gynecologist and ground-breaking sex educator
in Cuba, reminded interviewers in 1988, “You know this country inherited a system in
which the rural areas and small towns had little or no medical care before the revolution.”
(Fee)
He added that before the revolution, illegal abortions were common. They were most
often performed by doctors, without anesthesia, in unsanitary conditions.
Álvarez Lajonchere explained: “At the triumph of the revolution, the majority of these
abortion doctors left the country. There was no habit in the country of using contraceptives,
and contraception did not even appear in the medical school curriculum. … The
private physicians at the time didn’t give contraceptive services to their patients because
they could charge much more doing abortions.”
As a result, he said, “Since people didn’t have contraceptive habits, we encountered
serious difficulties in the first years after the triumph of the revolution.”
While half of all Cuban doctors left the island and went to capitalist countries, 97
percent of the physicians in obstetrics and gynecology emigrated. As a result, Álvarez
Lajonchere noted, overnight he became the oldest gynecologist/obstetrician in the country.
Álvarez Lajonchere said that, in addition, within months after the workers and peasants
took state power, “[A]ll of the professors at the medical school quit voluntarily, thinking
mistakenly that the government could not replace them. The government accepted
their resignations. It was a policy in the country, and still is, that if you really don’t want
to live in this country under socialism you should leave. You can’t create a socialist society
with people who are disaffected.
“So the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Health got together a course
for new professors,” he continued, “people who could never have been professors before
the revolution because of their low social class origins—they didn’t come from the upper
middle classes.”
The medical school faculty was replaced with new professors. “We all left private practice
and went to teach. It was an extraordinary advantage that we knew the conditions of
medical practice in the country. I became chief of the department of obstetrics and gynecology
at the one and only medical school. The first thing I did was to put contraception
into the medical school curriculum. There were never any restrictions about who could
have access to contraceptives in this country: not by age, not by race, not by anything.”
Cuba mobilized before first diagnosis 47