It’s possible Celino Villanueva Jaramillo is the world’s oldest man. Born in 1896, he is now 121 according to Chilean government records, making him four years older than the current Guinness World Record holder, the Guardian reports.
As of this writing, he is still living and in the care of Marta Ramírez, who first agreed to look after Jaramillo after his house burned down, leaving him penniless. She must have assumed it would be short-term, given that Jaramillo was then 99. That was over two decades ago.
So what is the secret to his longevity? Chilean officials have suggested he has state-run health care to thank. According to the Guardian, when the president and minister of social development visited Jaramillo a few years ago, they “told him he was a shining example of health and vitality . . . and of the government’s commitment to Chile’s seniors.”
The wonders of government-provided health care are often pointed to in efforts to explain the large number of the extrasuperannuated in Cuba (when lifetimes of limited calories may be the more plausible reason). Cuba, of course, is a classic case of communism’s economic decrepitude and ineptitude. But faith in the greatness of Cuba’s (understaffed, ill-equipped) hospitals might as well be the left’s old-time religion.
It was with a gimlet eye we saw an article published last month by RAND Corporation researchers titled “Doing More with Less: Lessons from Cuba’s Health Care System.” The irony is that the RAND Corporation was once essential to the success of the United States’ Cold War standoff with the Russkies. Instead of cheering regimes like Cuba’s, RAND researchers provided the Strangelovian intellectual firepower behind arguments a nuclear war was winnable (a doctrine that, however dubious, was necessary for deterrence to be credible).
Alas, RAND, which has long insisted on its nonideological centrism, isn’t quite the anti-Communist bulwark it once was. And if its soppy paean to Cuban medicine is any indication, it isn’t the home of megawatt brainiacs it once was either. The Scrapbook guesses it just goes to show: Live long enough and you’ll have seen everything.
