A Cuban flag.
A Cuban flag. Credit: Rawpixel Credit: Rawpixel

The January 29 executive order by President Donald Trump to blockade oil shipments to Cuba by threatening third party countries with 100 per cent tariffs is unprecedented and against the United National Charter.

That said – not much is stopping Trump these days including sending his wife Melania to address the United Nations Security Council in the wake of attacks on Iran.

The blocking of oil to Cuba is spurring demonstrations around the world in support of Cuba and is also encouraging NGOs and individuals to collect aid to be sent to Cuba. Generators, solar panels, food and medical aid among other items are being filled into containers. Mexico has sent at least four ships full of government aid and also donations from the Mexican people.

Most recently President Trump has said that he may license the sale of oil to private businesses in Cuba. We’ll see how that goes.

In Canada, The Canadian Network on Cuba and local chapters of Cuban solidarity groups are collecting donations, including solar powered generators for hospitals and schools. The federal government recently announced that it would be sending $8 million in humanitarian aid as well. There is hope for more from the federal government since that amount is considered by many to be more like a trial balloon. And it comes the day after billions were pledged to prolong the war in the Ukraine.

The Cuban people have learned resilience through 67 years of economic embargo and the further tightening of that embargo via the Helms-Burton Act applied by the United States in the early 1990s. The ‘Special Period’ in Cuba, which occurred after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1989, added further ingenuity, particularly when it came to food production. This column in rabble outlines how Cuban food production and agricultural methods were dramatically changed, changes largely to organic methods that  have continued to this day.

Now with this most recent US manoeuvre, the oil blockade, Cuba is stepping up efforts to acquire solar energy panels for hospitals, schools, key installations and residential areas throughout the island. Even motor bikes have moved from gas to working on solar panels. Soon Cuba may be the greenest nation on earth when it comes to sustainable energy sources – but getting there will not be easy.

Beyond agriculture contributions – and there are many – Cuba has made many other important contributions. Something that each of us should keep in mind as we reflect what the USA has been attempting to destroy for 67 years.

Most recently – there is an Alzheimer’s Treatment, NeuralCim, currently available in Cuba — a treatment that should be made available across the world. Here is a brief video from a team of journalists working with Belly of the Beast. And here is a trailer from the soon to be released full-length documentary called Teresita’s Dream.

Here are a few examples of how Cuba has supported and strengthened development in several countries and in several areas:

  • On March 29 1990 the first children, victims of radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster began arriving in Cuba for medical treatment. These children were housed in Tarara, a suburb near the beach 20 miles from Havana, which prior to the 1959 revolution had been the holiday homes of affluent Cubans. From March 1990 through to 2016 Ukrainian children and some adults were treated for skin diseases, cancers, and more, caused by the nuclear fallout from the accident in Chernobyl. In total 22,000 children and 4,000 adults were treated in Cuba. The need was huge, but Cuba did what it could, even during the Special Period of the 1990s when resources were scarce. I remember visiting Tarara on holiday and seeing those children, some of them severely disabled or in wheelchairs, being brought to the beach for recreation and swimming.

 

  • Cuba is a model in universal and free education. It is the country that spends the highest amount of its national budget on education worldwide. The Cuban literacy program “Yo, Si Puedo” (Spanish for “Yes, I can”) is a low-cost mass education program that involves relevant government and non-government agencies and actors to promote literacy among adults. It has been implemented in more than 29 countries and improved the lives of more than six million people.

 

  • Cuba founded the Latin American School of Medicine in 1999. The Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM) near Havana, offers free education to low-income students all over the world. As of today, more than 30,000 students from over 122 countries have graduated and are now able to offer their services to their communities. Included in these numbers are more than 200 students from poor neighbourhoods in the United States. This video shows how inspiring the program has been for many newly-graduated doctors from the USA.

 

  • Cuba has one of the most impressive national sports programs in the world and, through international collaboration it has helped provide coaching, training and education in sports and in sports medicine in more than 80 countries primarily in Latina America, Africa, and Asia. This article outlines how Cuba has punched above its weight when it comes to “sports diplomacy”.

Cuba’s humanitarian work has been recognized internationally by many countries. Here are two more examples that made headlines around the work and carried a global impact.

  • During the early, high-anxiety, days of the COVID-19 pandemic, no other countries would allow the British cruise ship the MS Braemar, to dock because it had passengers ill with COVID-19. Onboard were more than 1,000 passengers and crew, with more than 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19, onboard. The Cuban government on March 13, 2020, agreed on the request of the government of the United Kingdom, to receive the cruise ship in a Cuban port. The Cuban government, because of its belief that health is a human right, determined that it was important to allow the ship to dock and the ill passengers to be repatriated by air. All of this – despite the fact that no vaccines were yet available, the Cuban government followed the World Health Organization’s protocols to try to ensure the best safety measures possible – but all of this at a time when the world really did not know the full impact or extent or ramification of the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 18 2020 the MS Braemar docked at the Port of Mariel, 25 miles from Havana, and repatriation of its citizens by air was facilitated through José Marti Airport. The passengers on the Braemar were predominantly British but also included Canadian, Australian, Belgian, Colombian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, New Zealand, Norwegian and Swedish citizens.

 

  • Another key example with global impacts on health is the work of The Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade founded in September of 2005 to provide rapid, specialized medical assistance in response to natural disasters and severe epidemics worldwide. The Brigade’s creation was specifically aimed at offering help to the United States after Hurricane Katrina. Since then it has responded to disasters and epidemics. The Brigade has been involved in humanitarian relief in more than 50 countries and its medical personnel assisted during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, Andorra, Barbados, and other countries, and has provided emergency help in earthquakes in Kashmir, Haiti, Indonesia,China and Chile and floods in Bolivia and Mexico among others. The Brigade has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for its generous work. In 2017 the Brigade was awarded the Dr. Lee Jong-Wook Memorial Prize for Public Health by the World Health Organization.

The list of accomplishments could go on and on. Cuba, a small island, has been unjustly blockaded and choked through an economic embargo for almost 70 years by the most powerful country in the world, and yet, despite these attempts to destroy its self-determination, Cuba has been able to manage its limited resources to achieve so much.

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Lois Ross

Lois L. Ross has spent the past 30 years working in Communications for a variety of non-profit organizations in Canada, including the North-South Institute. Born into a farm family in southern Saskatchewan,...