Lessons From Cuba in AIDS Control - NYTimes.com

Fidel Castro, discussing AIDS prevention, 1983

I suppose that some creative genius like Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul will have some explanation for why the world's greatest health care system - ours - fails grievously when compared to the socialist system in a poor country we have tried for 50 years to isolate and defeat.  I expect that when the free enterprise system comes to Cuba health care will suffer.  - GWC
A Regime’s Tight Grip - Lessons From Cuba in AIDS Control - NYTimes.com:
by Donald G. McNeil, Jr.

Cuba now has one of the world’s smallest epidemics, a mere 14,038 cases. Its infection rate is 0.1 percent, on par with Finland, Singapore and Kazakhstan. That is one-sixth the rate of the United States, one-twentieth of nearby Haiti.
The population of Cuba is only slightly larger than that of New York City. In the three decades of the In In the three decades of the global AIDS epidemic, 78,763 New Yorkers have died of AIDS. Only 2,364 Cubans have. Other elements have contributed to Cuba’s success: It has free universal basic health care; it has stunningly high rates of H.I.V. testing; it saturates its population with free condoms, concentrating on high-risk groups like prostitutes; it gives its teenagers graphic safe-sex education; it rigorously traces the sexual contacts of each person who tests positive.
By contrast, the response in the United States — which records 50,000 new infections every year — seems feeble. Millions of poor people never see a doctor. Testing is voluntary, and many patients do not return for their results. Sex education is so politicized that many schools teach nothing about protected sex; condoms are expensive, and distribution of free ones is haphazard.

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