US’ failure to acknowledge Cuba’s medical efforts throughout Covid is because of an innate concern of linking socialism with something constructive

As clamor grows for Cuban medical doctors to obtain the Nobel Peace Prize for his or her worldwide work in the course of the pandemic, the US continues to oppose their efforts. It can’t be seen to endorse the concept that the socialist system works.

In his ebook, In Cuba, the late Liberation Catholic priest Father Ernesto Cardinal of Nicaragua relates that, upon visiting Cuba within the mid-1970s, he witnessed a complete nation which resembled a Franciscan Christian group – a set of individuals residing in easy, austere circumstances sharing what little they’d with one another. 

And, in fact, Cuba has turn into famend for sharing the little it has – little, due to a US embargo which has been strangling its financial system for practically 60 years – with the remainder of the world.

Probably the most vital contribution Cuba has made has been its worldwide medical solidarity, which has benefited scores of nations, principally, however not solely, within the growing world.

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Cuba started providing such help very shortly after the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro. Echoing Father Cardinal’s reflections about Cuba, Johns Hopkins College Professor Piero Gleijeses describes Cuba’s outreach to Algeria shortly after the Cuban Revolution within the following phrases: “It was an uncommon gesture: an underdeveloped nation tendering free help to a different in much more dire straits. It was provided at a time when the exodus of medical doctors from Cuba following the revolution had compelled the federal government to stretch its sources whereas launching its home packages to extend mass entry to well being care. ‘It was like a beggar providing his assist, however we knew the Algerian individuals wanted it much more than we did and that they deserved it,’ [Cuban minister of public health] Machado Ventura remarked. It was an act of solidarity that introduced no tangible profit and got here at actual materials value.”

Cuba has solely elevated such solidarity over time. For instance, it despatched medical doctors four,500 miles to Western Africa to efficiently battle the lethal Ebola virus. As well as, as The New York Occasions begrudgingly acknowledged, Cuban medical doctors have been within the forefront of the latest battle in opposition to cholera in Haiti. After the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Cuba took in 1000’s of youngsters affected by the fallout to be handled. Lots of these people nonetheless dwell in Cuba, years after the collapse of the us.  Cuba has even despatched medical doctors to assist in america – particularly, to battle toddler mortality in Chicago. 

Most lately, in the course of the Covid-19 disaster, Cuba has despatched medical doctors to each growing nations, corresponding to Venezuela, Suriname, Jamaica and Grenada, in addition to to developed nations, corresponding to Italy, to help in preventing the pandemic.  

To acknowledge Cuba’s international efforts to battle Covid-19, there’s a global motion afoot lobbying for its medical workforce, often called the Henry Reeve Worldwide Medical Brigade, to obtain the Nobel Peace Prize. A petition lobbying for this honor has garnered 30,000 signatures from world wide, together with from such notables as the previous president of Ecuador Rafael Correa, actors Danny Glover and Mark Ruffalo, and writers Alice Walker and Noam Chomsky. 

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Nevertheless, fairly shockingly, the US, standing practically alone on this planet, has opposed the efforts of Cuba to battle the worldwide pandemic from the very starting. Because the Asia Occasions explains: “The US authorities has continued attacking Cuban medical internationalism proper as much as the present pandemic, making wild allegations in opposition to this system that disparage the medical employees. Paul Hare, a former British ambassador to Cuba who teaches in america, instructed Reuters lately that the US is “virtually completely remoted” on the subject of its Cuba coverage. Annually since 1992, the United Nations Normal Meeting has voted to finish the US-imposed embargo on the island. In 2019, 187 nations stated the embargo should finish, whereas the US stood with two of its closest allies, Brazil and Israel. Ambassador Hare’s phrase “virtually completely remoted” is an understatement.”

This begs the query of why the US would oppose such worldwide solidarity. Definitely, a part of the animosity to Cuba and its international efforts flows from the truth that it has partnered intently with nations, like China, with which the US is at odds.

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Nevertheless, the reality is that Cuba’s shut ties with China, simply as its prior shut ties with the us, have largely been necessitated by the US’ aggressive financial blockade of the island nation, in addition to its incessant army threats. As Noam Chomsky has typically identified, the US deliberately acts in methods in the direction of fledgling revolutionary nations which push them into the arms of the Communist superpowers, after which factors to this as justification for extra intensified aggression.

In my very own view, the true cause the US is pushing in opposition to Cuban medical solidarity is its concern of what some, together with Oxfam Worldwide, have known as “the specter of a great instance.” 

That’s, nations like Cuba threaten the hegemony of the US and international capitalism by its very successes in constructing a socialist mannequin which exhibits that folks’s wants, each domestically and overseas, might be fulfilled higher within the absence of the revenue motive. Such examples should be destroyed, lest they show to different growing nations that they will do higher in the event that they depart the clutches of the predatory capitalist system. 

Furthermore, such examples even threaten to point out the individuals of the US – the nation which, regardless of its distinctive riches, has one of many worst Covid-19 charges on this planet – that there’s a higher solution to set up an financial system and a society.

At a time when the US voters’s assist for socialism is larger than it has been in a long time – partly due to the inequities and failures uncovered by the pandemic – Cuba represents an instance which the powers-that-be should destroy, and they’re appearing aggressively to strive to take action.

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