Cuba

Credit: Cubacooperation

A team of 85 Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Peru on June 3 to help the Andean nation tackle the coronavirus pandemic. That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced another tightening of the sanctions screws. This time he targeted seven Cuban entities, including Fincimex, one of the principal financial institutions handling remittances to the country.

Medicine has changed. We used to be a calling that catered to the public welfare, and our prime consideration was the patient. Now we are a business, and some of us practice as impersonal corporations, with the bottom line the profits, not the well-being of the patient.”
— From The Doctor, by Dr. Edward E. Rosenbaum, 1991

Cuban medical brigade returning from Italy (Photo: Ismael Fransisco Gonzalez)

Beginning in December 1951, Ernesto “Che” Guevara took a nine-month break from medical school to travel by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. One of his goals was gaining practical experience with leprosy. On the night of his twenty-fourth birthday, Che was at La Colonia de San Pablo in Peru swimming across the river to join the lepers.[Read More...]

Beginning in December 1951, Ernesto “Che” Guevara took a nine-month break from medical school to travel by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. One of his goals was gaining practical experience with leprosy. On the night of his twenty-fourth birthday, Che was at La Colonia de San Pablo in Peru swimming across the river to join the lepers. He walked among six hundred lepers in jungle huts looking after themselves in their own way.

-by Reese ErlichOne morning along a street with cracked sidewalks and houses with fading paint, Dr. Liz Caballero and two medical students stopped at every door in that part of Havana’s Vedado district. During normal times, these neighborhood doctors practice preventative medicine. Now, they participate in a full-blown campaign against the COVID 19 pandemic.Dr.

150 years ago, on April 21, 1870, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, was born. According to many, he was the greatest revolutionary of all times, a man who gave birth to both internationalism and anti-imperialism.
It is time to “revisit Communism”. It is also time to ask some basic, essential questions:

How is it possible that a system so logical, progressive, and so superior to what is, up till now, governing the world, failed to permanently overthrow the nihilism and brutality of capitalism, imperialism and neo-colonialism?

In April 2015, the Obama Administration removed Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism – a move in line with the diplomacy pursued following the release of the Cuban Five anti-terror agents from U.S. jails in 2014.

In recognition for the Cuban doctors’ efforts to aid nations across the world to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, there have been recommendations for the Henry Reeves Medical Brigade to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The brigade was founded by the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro after the U.S. rejected Cuba’s offer of humanitarian aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.