Fidel Versus COVID-19 and Beyond
- Iroel Sánchez -
Fidel at the National Center of Medical
Genetics, with Dr. Juan C. Dupuy Núñez, founding
coordinator of the Henry Reeve International Medical Contingent
Specialized in Disasters and Serious Epidemics. (Granma Archives)
The fact that Cuba's response to the COVID-19 has
been far more effective than most countries in the region, including
the United States and also several European nations, is a reality that
is becoming evident. A health system based on prevention, with a
presence in all communities of medical offices, organized by
neighbourhood and linked to polyclinics, as well as general and
specialized hospitals in all provincial capitals and some of the most
important cities, as well as medical schools, along with advanced
centres for biomedical research, have made possible active monitoring
and surveying to identify asymptomatic patients, to isolate them and
provide early treatment with national protocols and medicines, in
addition to the creation of our own technology to test patients,
requiring a minimum of costly reagents in pre-existing laboratories in
all the country's municipalities.
Cuba lost half of its doctors to the United States
in the years immediately following the triumph of the 1959 Revolution,
leaving barely 3,000, but today has 95,000, with the highest rate of
doctors per inhabitant on the planet.
While the majority of therapeutic clinical trials
underway around the world are being conducted to identify treatments to
contain the so-called cytokine storm in COVID-19 patients, the
inflammatory hyper-response triggered by the disease, Cuba has
successfully achieved this with a medicine of its own (CIGB-258). Cuba
is working urgently, as are great powers like the United States,
Germany, China, Russia and the United Kingdom, to produce a vaccine for
the prevention of the disease, and has developed its prototype of a
pulmonary ventilator for intensive care patients.
The above, as well as the creation of world-class
biotechnology research centres, the training of thousands of highly
qualified scientists committed to the health of their people -- who
have remained in Cuba, facing shortages and scarcity, despite
systematic "brain drain" policies of northern countries to attract
talent from the South, which the U.S. blockade intensifies in the Cuban
case -- came as the result of Fidel's vision which, beginning in the
early 1980s, encouraged the national production of medicines such as
interferon; innovative vaccines against diseases, such as Hepatitis B
and meningococcal meningitis; monoclonal antibodies for the treatment
of different types of cancer, and remedies that are unique in the
world, including one that has prevented innumerable amputations for
patients with diabetic foot syndrome, among many other achievements.
To be added to all this are innovative brain
research and our own diagnostic tools that allow pre-partum detection
of congenital defects, diseases present in the blood such as HIV and
others, now including COVID-19. All these treatments are available,
free or at a symbolic cost, to Cubans at the community level, along
with vaccinations against 13 diseases for children.
It was also in the mid-1980s when Fidel began to
speak out, as Cuba's medical schools were multiplying and the number of
students in health-related specialties growing. Despite the doubts of
more than a few skeptics and taunts from his enemies, he insisted that
the country would be a world power in medicine.
When, a few years later, the disappearance of the
USSR triggered the deepest economic crisis in Cuban history, scientific
research centres remained open, while the Comandante en jefe repeated:
"This country will live with the creations of our intelligence." The
export of medical services is today the main source of foreign exchange
for the Cuban economy, despite U.S. government persecution, while the
development of innovative biomedical products has also made an
important contribution.
Cuba is a world leader in health solidarity,
present in the most remote regions of poor countries and offering
thousands of scholarships for medical students, in addition to the work
of the Henry Reeve internationalist contingent for disaster situations.
It is not far-fetched to emphasize Fidel's role in
all of the above. Cubans watched him explain the efforts on television
in well-argued presentations, opening doctors' offices, hospitals,
polyclinics and scientific centres, and listened to his speeches at med
school graduations, not with the demagogy of a capitalist politician
who takes advantage of these occasions for some public relations
campaign, but with the knowledge of a person who conceived the project
and promoted it down to the last detail; someone who knew the "why and
what for" of everything, always thinking of how the most humble citizen
would benefit.
If this were not enough, there is the availability
of university institutions throughout the country, with accommodations
to house students from distant locations free of charge, which have
served as isolation centres during the epidemic, among them a
University of Computer Sciences, conceived by Fidel, where thousands of
professionals have been trained and applications have been developed
for cell phones, including the recently launched app allowing
individuals to self-report any COVID symptoms or provide information to
health authorities.
Likewise, it was Fidel who promoted the creation
of educational television with the needed facilities, which today has
allowed general and art education students to continue their learning
at home.
What about after the pandemic?
All that is very well, an observer could say, Cuba
will undoubtedly overcome the health crisis before others, but what
will happen after that, when the impact of intensified U.S. sanctions
which have battered the Cuban economy is compounded by the global
economic crisis, aggravated by the pandemic with its negative impact on
activities such as tourism, which play a key role in generating hard
currency for the nation. The economic damage caused by the virus has
created enormous challenges for all countries and even more so for one
facing the longest economic blockade in history.
As has been stated by the country's leadership, it
is essential to make decisive progress in the implementation of
economic transformations agreed upon at the VII Congress of the
Communist Party here, despite the new, unfavourable conditions,
The Cuban government has indicated that current
economic priorities include national production of food, with the goal
of producing most of our food on the island, along with fuel savings;
limiting imports given our dwindling reserves of foreign exchange; the
promotion of exports of all kinds; and the safe opening of tourism when
conditions allow. Here too, Fidel's ideas could play a very important
role.
The intensive cultivation of high-protein crops,
to which the Comandante dedicated his efforts in the last years of his
life, has great potential to provide animal feed, according to the UN's
Food and Agriculture Organization. Beginning in 2011, alongside Cuban
scientists and farmers, Fidel worked on research with moringa, mulberry
and tithonia as feed for monogastric (chicken, pig) and polygastric
(cattle and sheep) livestock. As occurred with his vision for Cuban
medicine and biotechnology, some mocked these projects, but scientific
research indicates that the three crops exhibit greater productivity
per hectare than soybeans, sunflower and alfalfa, allow up to eight
harvests a year, and support high density cultivation.
The extensive, innovative, unique knowledge
accumulated by Cuba in this field could be very attractive for foreign
investment, both associated with supplying the domestic market and for
export. Local development projects, facilitated by authorities granted
to municipalities in the new Constitution, could find opportunities in
this field, especially with the support of the Sierra Maestra Science,
Technology and Innovation Institute, founded in 2018 by the Cuban
government, to give continuity to this work initiated by Fidel.
It was also the Comandante who conceived
developing the keys off Cuba's coastline for tourism, accessible via
roads built over the water during the difficult 1990s, which today have
solid infrastructure, including airports. Practically virgin beaches on
islets north of the big island, without resident populations, could
provide the initial opening to international visitors, after the
epidemic is fully controlled, without putting population centers at
risk. Hotel companies such as Meliá and Iberostar are
already incorporating health sustainability as a fundamental value in
their post-pandemic strategy, and few tourist destinations in the world
can compete with what Cuba is able to offer when guarantees and
assurances are in place to reopen our borders.
This is not a panacea, which does not exist in
economic affairs, even more so in times of uncertainty and crisis at a
global level, but it is evident that Fidel is far from being "the one
responsible for the economic disaster," as some "Cubanologists" affirm,
but rather the contributor of very important ideas for sources of
income for a non-oil producing country, without great natural resources
or much fertile land, requiring irrigation and fertilization. A country
that has not only survived in conditions created by economic siege, but
has also developed a project of social justice that provides basic
services for all its citizens, that many countries lack, without the
problems that are endemic elsewhere, like organized crime and child
labour.
In addition to the massive training of highly
skilled human resources, clearly an incentive for foreign investment
and the export of professional services, as well as globally unique,
value-added products, which he promoted, Fidel Castro's tireless work
for his people has been not only a decisive factor in ensuring that the
humanitarian disaster evident in many other nations, with governments
that have opposed his model, has not occurred here. The example he
provided of tenacity, service to the people, eagerness for knowledge
and scientific rigour, contributes to the development of solutions here
that allow Cuba to once again dash the right wing dream of returning
our island to the status of "hybrid casino-whorehouse" that some
believe possible, in light of the "perfect storm" created by the
combination of a tightened economic blockade and the arrival of a
virus, which, if anything, has laid bare the unviable nature of the
economic, political and social system the Comandante devoted his life
to fighting.
This article was published in
Volume 50 Number 19 - May 30, 2020
Article Link:
Fidel Versus COVID-19 and Beyond - Iroel Sánchez
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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