Pay your way, capitalist-style
WORKERS, NOV 2007 ISSUE
Tuesday, the day before the Russia v England European Championship qualification match and leading up to the three o'clock news on TalkSport, presenters Hawksbee and Jacobs link with the radio station's correspondent in Moscow. Mike Parry is setting the scene and speaks fulsomely of how the city has changed from the cliché grey of communism into a metropolis made vibrant by rampant free enterprise.
A striking feature of this vital new culture, Parry declared, was prostitution. On almost every street corner, along nearly every street indeed, even emerging from the room next to his in the four star hotel, there were prostitutes. This is, he asserted, an acceptable way for young women to pay their way through medical school. At least, it occurred to one correspondent to Workers, they'd be able to treat their own sexually transmitted diseases.
What a trick the Cubans have missed turning. Mired as they resolutely are in those dreary socialist principles, they insist on training doctors freely, and not only for the benefit of their own country. Brigades of them are sent abroad to minister to some of the most hard pressed people in the world when they could be more gainfully employed servicing the sexual whims of four and five star visitors.
Worse still, they invite young people from impoverished backgrounds where crime and prostitution are often rife into their country and train them as doctors for free. They then return home, each one blighted by STI (Socialist Transmitted Internationalism), to serve the communities from which they've emerged.
Some of those invited into Cuba are from the USA which, given the opportunity, will render Havana into what Moscow has become. Perhaps, should that happen, a future England team will play in Cuba and a radio reporter can then confirm the widespread re-emergence of young women who may be paying their way through medical school.
If not, if Cuba can hold firm, such journalists will have to settle for the delights of present day Moscow's Red Light Square.