Determined to vaccinate its entire population this year and recover to 2019 levels of GDP by 2023, Cuba is facing great hurdles. The US Biden administration has left in place the 242 suffocating new sanctions, actions and measures introduced by the previous Trump administration to tighten the United States blockade. Nonetheless, the hope inspired by Cuba’s example continues to energise a growing international anti-blockade movement. WILL HARNEY reports.
Facing an alarming rise in daily Covid-19 cases, Francisco Durán, National Director of Epidemiology at the Ministry of Public Health, announced on 25 May that measures would be re-introduced requiring Cubans returning from abroad to isolate in their province of arrival for a week if they land via tourist hubs. Cuba had done exceptionally well in containing Covid-19 infections throughout 2020, with just 146 deaths in a population of 11.2 million. This was due to a strong test and trace programme run by a community-based public healthcare system, strict quarantine measures, quality primary and secondary care, and rapid production of novel treatments by a world-class biomedical sector.
However, facing an 11% contraction of GDP and with no access to international credit due to the illegal US blockade, Cuba was obliged to open its borders to international travel in late November 2020. Daily new cases figures for Covid-19 have been rising since January 2021. Despite this surge, Cuba still has relatively low rates of Covid-19 infections (11,753 per million population compared to Britain’s 65,497 per million), and mortality (77 deaths per million compared to Britain’s 1,873 deaths per million). Of the 901 people who had died from the virus in Cuba by 26 May, more than 50% of these deaths occurred in April-May 2021. Daily cases reached a new peak of 1,383 on 15 May. Mass vaccination is the next urgent step.
Cuba has put five domestically produced Covid-19 vaccines into clinical trials so far. One of them, Abdala, completed Phase III trials on 1 May and another, Soberana 02, will finish at the end of May; their efficacy is likely to be announced in June. Emergency ‘intervention’ studies started in March 2021 with the vaccination of more than 140,000 healthcare workers. By 21 May, 10% of the island’s population had received one dose of Cuba’s candidate vaccines. These vaccinations will be extended to 1.7 million inhabitants of Havana, the epicentre of cases. The plan is for 70% of Cuba’s population to be vaccinated by late August. However, due to the US blockade there is a shortage of 20 million syringes and other medical supplies which cannot be purchased from the US manufacturers or any company worldwide that uses US parts or equipment.
Days before leaving office the Trump administration added Cuba to the US’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list. The objective was to block Cuba’s access to international financial systems and obstruct the incoming Biden administration which, during the election campaign, had promised to ‘promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people’. Joe Biden was Vice President to Barack Obama, who announced rapprochement in 2014.
Biden has, so far, done nothing to change Cuba policy. In an interview with CNN on 8 April, Juan Gonzalez, head of Western Hemisphere affairs for Biden’s National Security Council, signalled that the administration is stalling: ‘Joe Biden is not Barack Obama in policy towards Cuba … the political moment has changed in an important way, the political space has closed a lot, because the Cuban government has not responded in any way.’
This has frustrated those who believed Biden would quickly return to rapprochement. However, beyond being an arch imperialist, Biden’s administration is dependent on politicians who have made careers out of attacking the Cuban revolution, such as Democrat senator Bob Menendez, now Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Social media influencers among Miami’s right-wing Cuban exiles are on overdrive urging Cubans on the island to stage theatrical micro-protests in public or acts of sabotage, in order to post them on the internet in return for payment – crumbs off the lucrative regime-change table. The Biden administration, observing these reactionary trends, may well be delaying his new Cuba policy to pursue the sinister purpose of the blockade: what US official Lester Mallory described in 1960 as ‘a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.’
Despite its own urgent challenges, Cuba has exemplified the socialist principle of international solidarity; as they say, ‘sharing what we have, not just what we have left over’. In addition to 28,000 healthcare professionals already working overseas, 4,982 Cuban medical personnel in 57 international medical brigades have treated over 1.2 million Covid-19 patients in at least 40 countries. A movement among Cuban-Americans emerged in July 2020 to demand an end to sanctions. It organises monthly ‘caravanas’ – mobile demonstrations of solidarity. Since March 2021 these have been organised internationally, including in Britain where the RCG has staged solidarity protests around the country through our campaign Rock Around The Blockade (RATB). On the 28 March, Cubans in Havana mobilised to support the international campaign. By April, the ‘global caravan’ had spread to more than 100 cities worldwide, from China to Chile.
The RCG and RATB are committed to the movement of international solidarity with Cuba, demanding an end to the US blockade. On 23 June, the UN General Assembly will vote on Cuba’s motion to condemn the US blockade for the 30th year. As every year, the whole world, minus the US and Israel (and possibly one or two others), will stand with Cuba. Meanwhile, we must help Cuba access the resources it needs to vaccinate its own people and, through its international programmes, potentially millions more people across the globe. The world cannot afford to lose socialist Cuba’s solidarity or its example.
Readers can donate to Cubanos en UK’s fundraiser for syringes for Cuba here:
tinyurl.com/CubanosenUK
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 282 June/July 2021
