My Kind of Model
Models, in general, don't do much for me. But this morning I came across an exception: the Czech Republic's Helena Houdova. Houdova runs a charity that supports impoverished children in nine countries. Together with a friend, Mariana Kroftova, she traveled to Cuba to investigate whether her charity could be of help to Cuban children. According to the Prague Post, they found AIDS victims institutionalized under "desperate" conditions, and poor Cubans living in shantytowns on the outskirts of Havana:
Among other sites, Houdová and Kroftová toured a sanitarium filled with suffering AIDS patients. In an interview with The Prague Post, Kroftová said the facility was "desperate.""These were HIV-positive people, and they have no other choice but to be there because they are not allowed to work if they are HIV-positive," she said. "The government puts them into these places which are so hidden, so far away, and the conditions are just terrible there."
Houdova photographed both the AIDS sanitarium and the poor districts they visited. Soon, the two women were confronted by a member of the Revolutionary Committee, who summoned a member of the secret police, who escorted them to a nearby police station. They were held there for eleven hours, but refused to sign a document confessing to "counterrevolutionary" crimes. (It says a lot about a country, by the way, when taking pictures is a crime.) Houdova's cameras were confiscated, but she preserved her photographs by slipping the memory chip from her digital camera into her bra.
Back in the Czech Republic, Houdova mounted an exhibit consisting of 24 of her photos. At the exhibit's opening, she denounced Castro's regime:
"People can't do what they love. People can't speak what they want," she said in an interview. "That's what's happening. The fact that the [government] says there is no poverty" only makes a bad situation worse, she said.
Houdova intends to exhibit her pictures in the US; when they are sold, the proceeds will go to SOS Cuba, an organization that aids Cuban dissidents.
While pretty much everyone has given up on Communism, Fidel's government still enjoys the support of leftists in both Europe and North America. It's great to see someone like Houdova blow the lid off the mythology surrounding Cuba's health care system, and expose the miserable poverty in which most Cubans live.
This is the only one of Houdova's photographs that I was able to find online; it comes from the Prague Post (which, by the way, I accessed through the international newspaper feature on Power Line News):
It's easier to find pictures of Helena Houdova, Miss Czech Republic of 1999. Here's one I liked:
