Oral History of HIV in Cuba

President Obama’s visit to Cuba this week has highlighted the fading of U.S.-Cuba alienation — but also the deep and lingering differences between the two countries, on issues from freedom of speech to free health care.  Here, reporter Rebecca Sananes shares a chapter of medical history in which Cuba chose a policy diametrically opposite to America’s: Back in the 1990s, Cuba created a network of sanitariums, where people with HIV were confined indefinitely. It sounds barbaric, but as former patient Eduardo Martinez’s recollections reveal, it’s complicated. Life in the sanitariums was so much better than outside that some people purposely infected themselves with HIV.  See full story here.