The Guardian wrote:General Máximo Gómez, a key figure in Cuba’s 19th-century wars of independence against Spain once said: “Cubans either don’t meet the mark – or go way past it.”
A century and a half later, the aphorism rings true. This downtrodden island struggles to keep the lights on, but has now vaccinated more of its citizens against Covid-19 than any of the world’s major nations.
More than 90% of the population has been vaccinated with at least one dose of Cuba’s homegrown vaccines, while 83% have been fully inoculated. Of countries with populations of over a million, only the United Arab Emirates has a stronger vaccination record.
“Cuba is a victim of magical realism,” said John Kirk, professor emeritus of Latin American studies at Dalhousie University, Canada. “The idea that Cuba, with only 11 million people, and limited income, could be a biotech power, might be incomprehensible for someone working at Pfizer, but for Cuba it is possible.”
The big headline here of course is that Cuba has vaccinated over 90% of its total population, including children, sailing past other more developed countries' vaccination efforts and keeping its own COVID case number down to a positively quaint couple of hundred cases a day. All this thanks to a homegrown vaccine developed by Cuban state industry, put into development because the Cuban government foresaw the widespread vaccine apartheid the developing world now experiences with Western-developed vaccines.
More interesting though is what the article does and doesn't mention as bits of descriptive detail about Cuba. See for example:
The vaccine success is all the more striking when set against the parlous state of the healthcare service in other areas. With hard currency inflows cut in half over the last two years, antibiotics are now so scarce that 20 pills of amoxicillin trade on the black market for the equivalent of a month’s minimum state salary. Out of plaster cast, doctors in some provinces now resort to wrapping broken bones in used cardboard.
Today, Cuba posts tens of thousands of doctors and nurses doing humanitarian work abroad – but fails to grow enough potatoes for the population.
Cuba’s highly centralized, state planning system – one of the last in the world – goes some way to explaining this paradox. When there is political will from the top, objectives can be driven forward; when there’s a lack of direction, the island’s rigid, Kafkaesque bureaucracy can elevate passing the buck to an art form.
It portrays the shortages as seemingly the result of Cuba's own 'quirky' economic system and 'Kafkaesque' bureaucracy. Curiously it doesn't mention one particularly important fact - the continuing impact of the decades long Cuban embargo. The embargo places severe restrictions on US businesses and those who do business with those businesses in other countries when it comes to trade with Cuba;
NBC News wrote:Eight U.S.-based groups that mainly support closer cultural and business ties to Cuba, including Engage Cuba, the Cuba Study Group and the Washington Office on Latin America, issued a letter on March 26 [2020], urging the U.S. government to suspend sanctions against Cuba during the coronavirus pandemic.
"Though there are supposed to be humanitarian allowances under the embargo framework, in practice, there are severe limitations and obstacles to delivering humanitarian assistance to Cuba," they wrote.
The group cited examples, such as a cap on the sale of medical goods "that restrict the percentage of U.S. content allowed in foreign sales to Cuba to less than 10%" and the fact that donations of supplies such as testing kits and respiratory devices "require a specific license, which takes time and a tremendous amount of paperwork."
And this places barriers on purely humanitarian aid as well:
Last month, a shipment of aid from Jack Ma, Asia’s wealthiest person and the founder of Alibaba, did not arrive in Cuba, after Colombian airline Avianca declined to take it.
An Avianca Airlines spokesperson referred NBC News to a press release from October that stated they were suspending ticket sales to and from Cuba while they resolve a pending matter with the Office of Foreign Assets Control, after a U.S. company became a majority shareholder of Avianca holdings.
The shipment to Cuba included face masks, gloves, and ventilators. The Jack Ma Foundation has been sending aid to countries all over the world, including the United States.
The U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday in a press release that it is ensuring the international flow of humanitarian aid continues to sanctioned countries, including Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and North Korea.
Asked why Cuba was not mentioned, a Treasury Department spokesperson said, “the list was illustrative, not exhaustive. It reflects the concentration of concerns that have been raised to OFAC over the last several weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
All this pains a clear picture: it's time for the Cuban embargo to end. We regularly do business with and even sell weapons to regimes that are far more violent and repressive than the Cubans with no moral compunction whatsoever. The embargo is a Cold War hangover that has persisted through the outsized influence of a tiny clique of reactionaries in the back-and-forth game of tug of war over Florida, and has become all the more offensive in the light of the pandemic.
What say you, NSG?
