Solidarity is priority of Cuba’s health care system
www.workers.org
By Rémy Herrera From a speech by Rémy Herrera of the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris given at the South South Forum (SSF Hong Kong) on July 3, 2024. Workers World publishes it with the author’s permission on the occasion of the 71st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada

Despite the embargo and the global chaos, Cuban researchers quickly managed to find effective vaccines against COVID-19: Abdalá or CIGB-66, designed by the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology and authorized for use by the regulatory authority Cecmed in July 2021 and Soberana 2 or Finlay-FR-2, from the Finlay Institute, authorized for use in August 2021.

National vaccination campaigns began in April 2021. Before that, Cuba had helped foreign countries, including those in the North, by sending doctors free of charge to Italy — to Lombardy in March 2020, then in Sicily and Calabria. This was the first time that Cubans provided treatment in Western Europe. In mid-2020, Cuba accepted France’s request for aid in its overseas departments and sent 2,579 health professionals to 24 countries.

Fifty countries have purchased recombinant interferon alfa 2B, the preventive anti-COVID-19 drug manufactured in Cuba, which has produced millions of doses for Southern countries. In Cuba, the campaign against the pandemic starting in January 2020 mobilized 28,000 medical students who visited 4 million people per day.

  • Despite all the difficulties, social progress has never stopped, and the quality of care offered to the population by its free health system has held up. A societal choice is made — cooperation and solidarity in an egalitarian and peaceful society rather than individualism and competition in an unequal and violent society. And this health system is integrated into a vision of harmony between humankind and nature — because the protection of the environment is real, with reforestation, organic farming and more measures.

Cuban researchers have therefore risen to the forefront in the world and, by remaining in the country, choose to serve their people — and often other peoples with their missions abroad. So we say: Gracias a Cuba.