Cuba’s new Family Code, passed in a referendum with 67% of the vote, expands women’s, children’s, and LGBTQ people’s legal rights

Cuban revolutionary, Raúl Castro, cast his vote in the referendum on the new Family Code on September 25. (Photo: Communist Party of Cuba/Twitter)

The people of Cuba approved a new progressive Family Code with an overwhelming majority in a historic national referendum on September 25. On the morning of September 26, Alina Balseiro, president of the National Electoral Council (CEN), reported that with 94.25% of the votes counted, Cubans decided by a resounding 66.87% of the votes to ratify the implementation of a new Family Code, written in consultation with the general public.

74.01%, or 6,251,786 of the total 8,447,467 eligible voters living in and outside Cuba took part in the unprecedented plebiscite. Of the 5,892,705 or 94.25% of the votes counted, 3,936,790 or 66.87% of the votes were for the option “YES”. Meanwhile, option “NO” obtained 1,950,090 or 33.13% of the votes.
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The new Family Code has been described by experts as the most inclusive, progressive and revolutionary code in the world. This new code legalizes equal marriage and equal adoption rights regardless of sexual orientation, recognizes the rights of surrogate mothers, recognizes women’s work in the household, and recognizes the role of grandparents in the family, among many more progressive victories.

Following the announcement of the preliminary results, thousands of Cubans took to social media networks to celebrate the ratification of the code. “Love is already a law,” “love, respect and unity won,” “Cubans voted with whole heart in favor of unity, socialism and revolution,” and similar resonant phrases flooded WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel, celebrating the results in favor of the option “YES”, tweeted, “Approving the new Family Code is doing justice. It is paying off a debt with several generations of Cuban men and women, whose family projects have been waiting for this Law for years. From today we will be a better nation.”

Foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez also welcomed the results. “Our people opted for a revolutionary, uplifting law that drives us to achieve social justice for which we work every day. Today we are a better country, with more rights,” tweeted Rodríguez.

Esteban Lazo, president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, stated, “Love, affection, peace, inclusion and social justice triumphed, it’s “YES” for Cuban families.”

Justice Minister Oscar Silvera Martínez also celebrated the results. “Our people, the sovereign protagonist of the referendum, approved the Family Code. From the Ministry of Justice, we congratulate all those who participated in the referendum on a Code of love, respect and equality. We are already working on its implementation and we will do it right,” he tweeted.

The executive secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), Sacha Llorenti, also congratulated the Cuban government and its people on the results of the historic referendum.
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“We extend our congratulations to President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the government and people of Cuba on successfully concluding the popular referendum on the Family Code. The Revolutionary people have sovereignly built one of the most advanced Codes in the world,” tweeted Llorenti.

The new code enacts sweeping advances in the rights of women, LGBTQ people, children, elderly people, and people with disabilities.

The new code guarantees the right of all people to form a family without discrimination, legalizing same sex marriage and allowing same sex couples to adopt children. Under the new code, parental rights will be shared among extended and non-traditional family structures that could include grandparents, step parents and surrogate mothers. The code also adds novelties such as prenuptial agreements and assisted reproduction.

The Code promotes equal distribution of domestic responsibilities amongst men and women and extends labor rights to those who care full-time for children, the elderly, or people with disabilities. The code establishes the right to a family life free from violence, one that values ​​love, affection, solidarity and responsibility. It codifies domestic violence penalties, and promotes comprehensive policies to address gender-based violence.

The Code also outlaws child marriage and corporal punishment, stating that parents will have “responsibility” instead of “custody” of children, and will be required to be “respectful of the dignity and physical and mental integrity of children and adolescents.” It also asserts that parents should grant maturing offspring more say over their lives.
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The new code also expands the rights of the elderly and people with disabilities. It recognizes the role of grandfathers and grandmothers in the transmission of values, culture, traditions and care.

This article was republished from People's Dispatch. 

To extend a population’s life expectancy at birth (LEB) requires capabilities that are scarce in the United States. The U.S. LEB has fallen in the recent period, quite abruptly. Meanwhile, life expectancy in China and Cuba continues its long-term rise. To understand why we should explore nations’ varying capabilities to achieve social change and promote social gains.

Medical and sociological causes of death that relate to life expectancy and are specific to the United States will not be explored here. A subsequent report will cover that ground.
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The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics on Aug. 31 set U.S. LEB for 2021 at 76.1 years, the same figure as in 1996. The decline from 77.0 years in 2020 and from 78.8 in 2019 was the greatest continuous U.S. fall in LEB in 100 years. Life expectancy for men in 2021, 73.2 years, represented an unprecedented male-female gap of almost six years (increased male mortality is routine).

Policies put in place following the two countries’ socialist revolutions led to wide-ranging social initiatives that are protective of all people’s lives and, incidentally, crucial for long life expectancy. Capitalist governments, less oriented to social change, are prone to tolerating gaps in social development.

The two socialist countries pursued particular objectives to achieve social gains. Specifically, they have endeavored to establish working-class political power, promote decent and healthy lives for all working people, eradicate major economic inequalities, and build unity.

Some capitalist countries have also attempted to fulfill a few of these objectives when under left-wing governance, with mixed success. A look at how well they may have succeeded, and at some of the consequences when they have not, may shed light on the failings of capitalist states to support the lives of their people, particularly the U.S.’ failure to sustain a LEB that in 2020 was already lower than that of 53 other countries.

The subject of providing social support is, of course, vast. On that account, the discussion here pays more attention to health care and less to other areas. It draws on the insights of Vicente Navarro, professor of public health and public policy at universities in Baltimore and Barcelona.

As regards working-class political power, Navarro maintains that “countries with strong labor movements, with social democratic and socialist parties…have developed stronger redistribution policies and inequality-reducing measures…. These worker-friendly countries consequently have better health indicators [including LEB] than those countries where labor movements are very weak, as is the case in the United States.”

Navarro blames the lack of universal health care in the United States, unique among industrialized nations, on the lack there of a strong labor movement and/or a labor or socialist party. Political power exerted by the organized working class in industrialized nations may vary, but it almost always exceeds workers’ power in the United States, where statistical markers of health outcome are decidedly less favorable.

The political weakness of the organized workers’ movement in the United States is clear. “The working class,” Navarro writes in 2021, does not appear anywhere in the Cabinet nor the Senate, and only appears in the House with an extremely limited representation of 1.3 percent.” Most “members of these institutions belong to the corporate class, closely followed by upper-middle class.” He condemns the “privatization of the electoral process,” in which “there is no limit to how much money can go to the Democratic or Republican party or their candidates.”

Decent and healthy lives are far from routine in capitalist countries, where poor health is associated with low social-economic status. Navarro reports that, in the United States, the “blue-collar worker has a mortality rate from heart conditions double that of the professional class. Mortality differentials by social class are much larger in the United States than in Western Europe.”

He notes that “top level British civil servants live considerably longer than do lower level ones,” and that “members of the [Spanish] bourgeoisie…live an average of two years longer than the petit bourgeoisie…who live two years longer than the middle class, who live two years longer than the skilled working class, who live two years longer than members of the unskilled working class, who live two years longer than the unskilled [and unemployed] working class.”

Alienation under capitalism exacerbates health problems. According to Navarro, “the distance among social groups and individuals and the lack of social cohesion that this distance creates is bad for people’s health and quality of life.” The social isolation he describes adds to challenges faced by social support systems and detracts from the usefulness of interventions.

Attempts by capitalist countries to remove wealth inequalities, especially in the health care arena, show mixed success. As commercialization of healthcare advances, difficulties mount. As the result of profit-taking in that sector, society-wide inequalities are aggravated, and working people lose equal access to quality care.

And yet some form of public overview of, or support for, health care sectors is more or less routine in the various capitalist countries. In many, public authorities operate and pay for hospitals, nursing homes, staffing, drugs, equipment, and training. But the infiltration of market prerogatives and privatization in the health care systems of richer countries now threatens long established goals of accessible health care for all.

In Europe, austerity campaigns under neoliberal auspices have led to cutbacks in publicly provided care. Privatization inroads blunted the institutional response in Europe to the COVID-19 pandemic. Investor groups have been eyeing the hospital and nursing home sectors as profit-making opportunities. According to the Lancet medical journal, privatization within the British National Health Service contributed to an increase in preventable deaths from all causes between 2013 and 2020.

The United States is the poster child of war in defense of privilege. There are stories, from health care:

In 2020 salary and benefits for William J. Caron, Jr., CEO of MaineHealth, a major care provider in the author’s locality, were $1,992,044; for Richard W. Petersen, Maine Medical Center CEO, they were $1,822,185. A commentator notes that “Hospital CEOs are compensated primarily for the volume of patients that pass through their doors—so-called “heads in beds.” Average annual income for U.S. primary care physicians was $260,000 in 2021; for specialists, $368,000.

According to bain.com, “Medtech companies are among the most profitable in the healthcare industry, with margins averaging 22%…profit pools [will] grow to $72 billion in 2024.” And “HME (home medical equipment) retail companies average 45 percent gross profit margin (GPM).”

Researchers found that between 2000 and 2018, the “median annual gross profit margin” (gross profit is revenue minus costs) of 35 pharmaceutical companies was 39.1% higher than that of 357 non-pharmaceutical companies. The CEOs of three major pharmaceutical companies” increased their wealth by “a total of $90 million” in 2018. As for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers: “Moderna’s and BioNTech’s 2021 net profit margins reached 66% and 54%, respectively.”

The matter of creating unity to establish socialism and arrange for the common good needs little comment. Unity within society is a near impossibility under capitalism, inasmuch as divisions there are inherent to a world of greed and individualism. Meanwhile, China, opting in favor of life, put on a magnificent display of socialist unity as its people grappled with the pandemic.

The government imposed strong preventative measures and accepted the inevitability of economic disruption and loss. China’s COVID-19 mortality rate is 1.07 deaths per 100,000 persons. Its U.S. counterpart never seemed to choose and, that way protected economic growth. The U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate is 319.59 deaths per 100,000 persons.

It is important, finally, to lay to rest any suggestion that the riches of the United States and other capitalist nations automatically enable them to offer long life expectancies. Individualized entitlement to wealth is basic to how they operate, and that’s a contradiction and an obstacle.

A society aiming to pursue social initiatives that are comprehensive and directed to all population groups equally is a society that has to redistribute wealth. Wealth redistribution is the necessary adjunct to the objectives already discussed. The message here is that capitalist-inspired measures don’t make the grade and that socialist programs, as in Cuba and China, do work and do offer the promise of decent and secure lives to entire populations.
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As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.

Cimavax-EGF, a Cuban therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer, conquers the scientific community and the population of the United States based on the achievements compiled in studies carried out.

Cimavax-EGF, a Cuban therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer, conquers the scientific community and the population of the United States based on the achievements compiled in studies carried out. The vaccine was obtained after more than two decades of research and have shown satisfactory results in patients in advanced stages of lung cancer.

The Cuban Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) and the Roswell Park Cancer Research Center in Buffalo, in the United States of America, joined forces a few years ago to facilitate access to equipment and reagents in order to promote the development of the drug, reported Russia Today.

The creation of the only joint venture between Cuba and the United States, the Innovative Immunotherapy Alliance, a biotechnological company to insert the drug in the U.S. society, facilitated Cuba's access to equipment and reagents which are very difficult to obtain due to the limitations of the coercive measure of the economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed by the United States on the island, and the northern country can have access to a drug with excellent results and prospects.

Doctor Elia Neninger, who participated of in the clinical trials of the therapeutic vaccine from the beginning, assured the Russian TV station that the drug has two great advantages: few adverse reactions and a solution to lung cancer, which is a serious health problem in Cuba.

Deputy director of the Molecular Immunology Center Kalet León Monzón said that the patients who have received the vaccine are recovering from advanced tumor cancer and could have the prospect of survival in normal conditions in the very short term, according to Russia Today.

One of the beneficiaries of the vaccine, Miguel Creus, a patient who began to receive Cimavax 15 years ago, when the disease was in stage four and the vaccine was in clinical trials, assures that the drug has prolonged his life with a satisfactory state of health, and that at present he has no traces of tumors or symptoms of the disease.

Despite the effects of the economic blockade of the United States against Cuba, the collaboration between the two institutions continues and Cimavax overcomes the challenges. At present, there are clinical trials that combine this Cuban vaccine with other successful cancer treatments and their effects in high-risk people or patients in the initial stages of the disease are being studied.

According to some studies, lung cancer is the third most frequent cancer in the United States and the deadliest. This Cuban drug could be a promising relief, a good example of the benefits both nations would obtain if they had a normal relationship. (International News Office)
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Translated by ESTI

Neither is it allowed that human beings are recruited as mercenaries, forced labor workforce, sexual exploitation workers, nor for the extraction and trade of organs.

However, despite this prevailing truth, it does not mean that the island is exempt from appearing in one or another of the lists prepared by the U.S. State Department from time to time. So, Cuba, which is a proud, resilient country, is judged for anything such as this recurrent unfounded accusation of human trafficking.

Behind these lists are the "sanctions", old and new, including those announced by Trump, which Biden keeps intact.

It is the height of irrationality that Cuba should be sanctioned because it sends doctors and other health professionals to help the peoples in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society of dozens of countries.

Making up that Cuban medical collaboration is an expression of human trafficking is crude and untruthful, to say the least, and a sign of the desire to use a fallacy to discredit medical solidarity offered by Cuba, which is a colossal, human task.

It does not matter if this slander leaves children, women and the elderly to die unprotected by neoliberal governments or threatened by the United States, for whom the word solidarity is just another profitable practice.

Cuba is once again included in the list of countries who fail to comply with the international standards to fight human trafficking according to a report on said crime in 2022, presented by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

To this repeated hoax, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla warned that the U.S. government lacks moral authority and lies about Cuba's fight against human trafficking.

"Their slander will not succeed in tarnishing the exemplary work in preventing and combating this scourge, nor will they bend our commitment to international medical cooperation," the minister posted on Twitter.
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Translated by ESTI

The words of the Pope, which were warmly received in Cuba as they came from a dearest friend, stirred the hatred and the insults typical of the enemies of the Revolution. 

The enemies of Cuba felt uncomfortable with the answers of Pope Francis during a recent interview with TV network Univision when he said, "Cuba is a symbol, Cuba has a great history".

The head of the Catholic Church also stated he rejoiced when an unprecedented process of normalization of the relations between the two countries began on December 17, 2014.

With the usual viciousness that characterizes the Cuban extreme rightwing based in the United States and its cronies in several countries, they immediately launched an attack against the Pope.

Some of the words uttered by the Pope took them to the paroxysm of rage, such as "I love the Cuban people very much. I had good human relations with Cuban people and also, I confess, I have a human relationship with Raul Castro."

The Miami media tried to make believe that the Pope’s statements arouse discontent among the "Cuban people" and the international community. They even accused him, based on their particular opinion on the subject, of betraying the inhabitants of the Island, of "scandalizing" Christians and "disrespecting" the Church.

Republican congressmen of Cuban origin said they were "deeply disappointed" by the Pope's failure to condemn the "atrocious abuses of the Castro regime" and to show solidarity with "the Cuban people's demands for freedom," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Tamara Taraciuk, acting director of Human Rights Watch for the Americas, criticized the Pope's position on Cuba, and dared to call on him to play "an important role" in human rights issues.

This is not the first time that the extreme right has attacked the Pope. The most conservative Catholics have always seen him as a Pope who is "too close to the poor," and some even labeled him a communist, as if being on the side of the vulnerable were not one of the central axes of Christian doctrine.

The chorus of furies at the service of the discrediting campaigns against Cuban even went as far as, in their usual display of ignorance, bad taste and lack of ethics, referring to the "danger" that the Holy Father's pronouncement means, from the point of view of his infallibility.

In the theology of the Catholic Church, papal infallibility constitutes a dogma declared in 1870 at the First Vatican Council. The Pope is preserved from committing an error when he promulgates to the Church a dogmatic teaching on matters of faith and morals, under the rank of "solemn pontifical definition" or ex cathedra declaration.

Since it is considered a truth of faith, no discussion is allowed within the Catholic Church and it must be unconditionally complied with and obeyed.

The Holy Father did not make an ex cathedra manifestation in his statement; only a group of haters could think something like that. What he did was to show, as a human being, his love and friendship to the Cubans, a people that welcomed him with immense affection when he visited the island.

Pope Francis would say -as John XXIII once did before the students of the Pontifical Greek College- "Ío non sono infallibile, I am only infallible when I define ex cathedra, but I will never do it".

The extreme rightwing based in Miami does not "forgive" the him for his meeting with the historic leader of the Revolution Fidel Castro Ruz when he visited Cuba in 2015. They also reproach him that in 1998, when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he wrote a book entitled Diálogos entre Juan Pablo II y Fidel Castro (Dialogues between John Paul II and Fidel Castro), in which he advocated a rapprochement with the Government of Cuba.

Just as they "do not forgive" his opinions regarding Cuba, conservatives do not tolerate Francis' position in favor of peace, his support for the legalization of civil unions between people of the same sex, his defense of multilateralism and the need for a reform of the United Nations, which he stated unequivocally in his speeches at this organization, as well as in Fratelli tutti.
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In Cuba, his words were received as those of a friend consistent with his doctrines and faith.

The drastic reduction in infant mortality rates is yet another testimony to the Cuban Revolution’s attention to the health of the country’s population

Palpite, Cuba, is just a few miles away from Playa Girón, along the Bay of Pigs, where the United States attempted to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Down a modest street in a small building with a Cuban flag and a large picture of Fidel Castro near the front door, Dr. Dayamis Gómez La Rosa sees patients from 8 am  to 5 pm. In fact, that is an inaccurate sentence. Dr. Dayamis, like most primary care doctors in Cuba, lives above the clinic that she runs. “I became a doctor,” she told us as we sat in the clinic’s waiting room, “because I wanted to make the world a better place.” Her father was a bartender, and her mother was a housecleaner, but “thanks to the Revolution,” she says, she is a primary care doctor, and her brother is a dentist. Patients come when they need care, even in the middle of the night.
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Apart from the waiting room, the clinic only has three other rooms, all of them small and clean. The 1,970 people in Palpite come to see Dr. Dayamis, who emphasizes that she has in her care several pregnant women and infants. She wants to talk about pregnancy and children because she wants to let me know that over the past three years, not one infant has died in her town or in the municipality. “The last time an infant died,” she said, “was in 2008 when a child was born prematurely and had great difficulty breathing.” When we asked her how she remembered that death with such clarity, she said that for her as a doctor any death is terrible, but the death of a child must be avoided at all costs. “I wish I did not have to experience that,” she said.

The region of the Zapata Swamp, where the Bay of Pigs is located, before the Revolution, had an infant mortality rate of 59 per 1,000 live births. The population of the area, mostly engaged in subsistence fishing and in the charcoal trade, lived in great poverty. Fidel spent the first Christmas Eve after the Revolution of 1959 with the newly formed cooperative of charcoal producers, listening to them talk about their problems and working with them to find a way to exit the condition of hunger, illiteracy, and ill-health. A large-scale project of transformation had been set into motion a few months before, which drew in hundreds of very poor people into a process to lift themselves up from the wretched conditions that afflicted them. This is the reason why these people rose in large numbers to defend the Revolution against the attack by the US and its mercenaries in 1961.

To move from 59 infant deaths out of every 1,000 live births to no infant deaths in the matter of a few decades is an extraordinary feat. It was done, Dr. Dayamis says, because the Cuban Revolution pays an enormous attention to the health of the population. Pregnant mothers are given regular care from primary care doctors and gynecologists and their infants are tended by pediatricians—all of it paid from the social wealth of the country. Small towns such as Palpite do not have specialists such as gynecologists and pediatricians, but within a short ride a few miles away, they can access these doctors in Playa Larga.

Walking through the Playa Giron museum earlier that day, the museum’s director Dulce María Limonta del Pozo tells us that the many of the captured mercenaries were returned to the US in exchange for food and medicines for children; it is telling that this is what the Cuban Revolution demanded. From early into the Revolution, literacy campaigns and vaccination campaigns developed to address the facts of poverty. Now, Dr. Dayamis reports, each child gets between 12 and 16 vaccinations for such ailments as smallpox and hepatitis.
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In Havana’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), Dr. Merardo Pujol Ferrer tells us that the country has almost eradicated hepatitis B using a vaccine developed by their Center. That vaccine—Heberbiovac HB—has been administered to 70 million people around the world. “We believe that this vaccine is safe and effective,” he said. “It could help to eradicate hepatitis around the world, particularly in poorer countries.” All the children in her town are vaccinated against hepatitis, Dr. Dayamis says. “The health care system ensures that not one person dies from diarrhea or malnutrition, and not one person dies from diseases of poverty.”

What ails the people of Palpite, Dr. Dayamis says, are now the diseases that one sees in richer countries. It is one of the paradoxes of Cuba, which remains a country of limited means—largely because of the US government’s blockade of this island of 11 million people—and yet has transcended the diseases of poverty. The new illnesses that she says are hypertension and cardiovascular diseases as well as prostate and breast cancer. These problems, she points out, must be dealt with by public education, which is why she has a radio show on Radio Victoria de Girón, the local community station, each Thursday, called Education for Health.

If we invest in sports, says Raúl Fornés Valenciano, the vice-president of the Institute of Physical Education and Recreation (INDER), then we will have less problems of health. Across the country, INDER focuses on getting the entire population active with a variety of sports and physical exercises. Over 70,000 sports health workers collaborate with the schools and the centers for the elderly to provide opportunities for leisure time to be spent in physical activity. This, along with the public education campaign that Dr. Dayamis told us about, are key mechanisms to prevent chronic diseases from harming the population.
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If you take a boat out of the Bay of Pigs and land in other Caribbean countries, you will find yourself in a situation where healthcare is almost nonexistent. In the Dominican Republic, for example, infant mortality is at 34 per 1,000 live births. These countries—unlike Cuba—have not been able to harness the commitment and ingenuity of people such as Dr. Dayamis and Dr. Merardo. In these other countries, children die in conditions where no doctor is present to mourn their loss decades later.

​How to think and do Cuba today? The liberal thought trends which are globally hegemonic, have a discourse about our country that is characterized by one key aspect: they analyze the Cuban reality through a rhetoric full of abstractions, while proposing solutions that mimic the model of liberal democracies of the so-called “first world”.
 
The Cubans who did the most to obtain unity among the different political powers of the nation, also were two essential pillars in the making of an of authentic and counter-hegemonic platform of thought, according to the moment in which they lived: José Martí and Fidel Castro.
 
They did not forge unity in a vacuum, they did so without abandoning the development of a specific political program, with a deep sense of independence, anti-imperialist, and social justice; in the case of Fidel, a program also deeply rooted in Marxism.
 
Both revolutionary leaders gave a fundamental weight to the plane of ideas and through millions of pages filled with the best of Cuban and global thought left their mark on history. Something distinguishes them: a vision of Cuba taking into account all the variables of its context. This means, above all, the analysis of the sociopolitical situation in Cuba at the height of the time in which they lived.
 
Through their essential contradictions, their sharp edges, their difficult points, they never shied away from addressing the knots in which the course of the nation faltered at on its path towards sovereignty and social justice.
 
Considering the given sociohistorical determinations, also, the geopolitical coordinates of Cuba, located 90 miles from the United States and in South Latin America. Any analysis of our reality, even of its internal contradictions, that does not take into consideration the mentioned facts, is a limited analysis.
 
“I’m the son of America and I owe it to her” Marti would say, and in that way connect to the reality of the Latin-American peoples, those who are “From Bravo to Patagonia” . Sometimes among Cubans there is a vision of capitalism that is unjustifiably closer to what the Nordic social democracies are, than to what capitalism has been and is in our region. What are the problems of our peoples and what are also their forms of resistance and struggle?  
 
The exercise of Marxism can be a valuable resource to continue developing critical revolutionary thought, without which it will be difficult to put the problems we face into perspective, if we wish to deepen socialism and, for that matter, carve out a horizon of greater democracy and equality.
 
Today, other demands require our attention in form of thought and practice. There is the call of popular, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial feminisms, with a collective imaginary and tradition of struggle from below and to the left, to which we could contribute much of our experience, and from which we could also learn. We should not stay on the sidelines of the epistemic revolution that feminisms have promoted through their rebellion against capitalism and the heteropatriarchy.  
 
Cuba’s proposition in this context is, then, a provocation to the dialogue, critical revolutionary thought, politicization, and collectivization of the analysis of our reality.
 
It is important that we focus and denounce the enemy, but it is also very necessary to work on strengthening the socialist culture, the critical analysis and political debate between us.

​Millions have proudly bared their shoulders to receive the Cuban vaccine "Abdala," but few know that this was the name given by Cuba’s national hero, José Martí, in his dramatic poem of the same name, to a young black African who fought and died for the independence of his country, Nubia, invaded by colonialists.

Abdala is the first play written by Martí when he had not yet reached 16 years of age. It is a testament to the love for his homeland of a young man from Nubia, a Sudanese region south of Egypt, a poem published in the context of the beginning of Cuba’s first war against Spain.

In its eight scenes, the young Martí outlines his patriotic ideals and offers a preview of his own life. In the initial part of the drama, a senator comments to Abdala that a conqueror is threatening to occupy Nubian territory, and upon hearing the news the young man responds firmly:

“Well, tell the tyrant that in Nubia / There is one hero for each of his twenty spears... “
The third act of the play features Abdala's meeting with warriors going out to confront the aggressors, when he says:

“To war, brave men! From the tyrant / Let the blood flow, and to his impudent enterprise / Let our stout breasts serve as walls, / And let their blood fire our audacity!”
The fourth and fifth scenes are very moving, as they reflect his mother's fear for her son, as she attempts to dissuade him from going to war, but Abdala tells her that he cannot be detained and is going to the countryside to defend his homeland. In this part of the play, Martí conveys in Abdala's voice his concept of homeland, which is well known and clearly evident in his life’s work:

“Love, mother, for the Homeland / Is not ridiculous love for the land, / Nor for the grass where our plants tread; / It is invincible hatred for those who oppress it, / Eternal wrath for those who attack it…”

Anticipating what would be his own death in combat, Martí concludes his dramatic poem as Abdala lies dying but happy, content that the enemy had been defeated.

Like the young Abdala, created in his work when he was only an adolescent, Martí dedicated his life to his people’s cause and was present where the battles were fought, facing the death he had foreseen.
Cuba’s national hero lived his life according to the precept he raised in New York City’s Hardman Hall, on October 10, 1890, when he insisted: "The true man does not look toward the side where one lives better, but toward the side where duty lies; this is the true man."
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And this is Abdala, in the vaccine we carry inside, with the same patriotic pride with which Martí conceived the young African hero.

​Chilling testimony of the torture and abuses committed against Majid Khan, held at the illegal Guantanamo Naval Base, after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, was recently presented by the prisoner before a jury of eight U.S. military officers, members of the court trying him.

Khan, born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Pakistan, was sentenced, October 29, to 26 years in prison after pleading guilty to aiding the Islamic fundamentalist group Al Qaeda.

As part of the plea bargain reached with the court, he was allowed to testify about his experiences, in what was the first public description of abuse by a detainee following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S., according to The New York Times.

Sensory assault with intense light and sound, sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positioning, submersion in a tub of ice water, were among the "techniques" used by torturers to obtain information from the detainee.

After two days deprived of sleep and subjected to freezing temperatures, he lost his sense of reality and began hallucinating, seeing a cow, a gigantic lizard, Khan stated. In this situation, he "confessed" to his executioners whatever they wanted to hear in order to put an end to the torture.

Recently, Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner held on suspicion of being a "mastermind" of 9/11, submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court a document describing the torture he endured in a clandestine CIA prison in Poland two decades ago.

The prisoner recounts that he suffered 83 simulated drownings, the barbaric "specialists" pretended to bury him alive, keeping him locked in a narrow for coffin11 days.

Abu Zubaydah, Majid Khan and many other prisoners illegally held in secret CIA prisons were subjected to so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," as the CIA practices are known.

​From its inception in 1947, the CIA devoted substantial resources to developing interrogation techniques to extract information.

In 1963, the agency translated the results of its studies into a secret counterinsurgency manual, entitled Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, which was distributed for use around the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America.

"The right pain, at the right time, in the right amount, for the right effect," were the words used to describe the CIA’s torture by Dan Mitrione, an FBI agent who served as a U.S. security advisor in Latin America, under cover as a U.S. Agency for International Development official.

Considered one of the masters of torture, his experience in the "deterrence" of "adversaries" in Uruguay in 1969 was incorporated into the CIA manual.

In 1983 they wrote a new book entitled Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual, which was refined in 1996.

Several corrections were made to the manual based on Congressional investigations, arrangements of extraordinary cynicism, including a suggestion made by Donald Rumsfeld in a memo, referring to so-called "stress positioning," which was to be inflicted up to four hours. He commented: "I stand eight to ten hours a day. Why limit it to four hours?"

As Alfred McCoy explains in his book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, the techniques used at Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantánamo, denounced by Majid Khan and other victims, are the product of massive and secret CIA research on the coercion and malleability of human consciousness.

A May 2005 report by Physicians for Human Rights, entitled Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces, contains a wealth of information on the torture techniques used at Guantanamo and other imperialist detention centers.

What do these methods of detention, interrogation, imprisonment without trial, secret prisons where a person can disappear for years, say about respect for human rights, which the gentlemen in Washington boast rant about so much? Is there any evidence of due process or the most elementary norms of delivering justice in these cases in these cases, principles the U.S. government self-righteously claims to protect

The country that threatens Cuba, wielding the power of its weapons and its arrogance demanding that our besieged island allow its mercenaries to break the law and deny the rights of the majority, has no moral authority to demand anything from anyone. Do as I say and not as I do - a saying that seems fit the empire’s actions perfectly.

​To understand the Cuban Embargo, one must understand that it is only one aspect in the broader goal of America to rule over Cuba. The US has long had an interest in colonizing Cuba. In 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote a letter to U.S Minister to Spain Hugh Nelson about the possibility of annexing Cuba within the next fifty years. The Cuban sugar industry at that time had been incredibly lucrative and drew the attention of American investors. Twenty five years later, in 1848, James Polk offered to buy Cuba from Spain for $100,000,000. This offer was rejected.

Though the US may have never formally colonized Cuba, its economic domination of the island could be comparable to that of any colonial power. By the 1870s, 75% of Cuba’s sugar was exported to the US. In 1895, US investments in Cuba were valued up to $95,000,000. Cuba’s industries and economy quickly became subordinated to US corporations. In 1894, 90% of Cuba’s exports went to the US and 38% of its imports were from the US. Cuba served as a valuable geopolitical outpost for the US. It would be valuable in defending Florida and New Orleans, along with serving as an outpost and springboard for further economic and political control of Latin America.

While Cuba might have technically gained independence from the US in 1902, the Platt Amendment, however, kept Cuba in a continual state of colonial subjugation. The Platt Amendment allowed the US to intervene in Cuba at any time. It also set up US control of Cuba’s foreign policy and its public finances. In addition, much of Cuba’s wealth remained in US hands. In essence, the Platt Amendment and the presence of US corporations reduced the notion of Cuban independence to a myth. By the 1920s two thirds of Cuba’s sugar production was controlled by US companies and in 1929, US investments in Cuba reached almost a billion dollars and 62% of it went into the sugar industry. By the 1950s Cuba was the largest recipient of US aid and the US controlled almost all the important industries in Cuba. By 1955, 90% of telecommunications and electric services, 40% of the sugar industry, and 50% of public service railways were in the hands of American investors. Four years later, the US controlled 90% of all the mines, 80% of the utilities, and almost all the cattle ranches and the entire oil industry.

However, this vast investment in Cuba did not benefit the majority of Cubans, instead much of this wealth was repatriated back to the US or consumed by the American and Cuban elites on the island. That’s not to forget of course that US investment in Cuba heavily favored multinationals, and many of these corporations didn’t have to pay taxes to the Cuban government and were allowed to keep their profits, thus doing very little to develop an independent Cuban economy or help the lives of everyday Cubans. In fact, life for everyday Cubans was quite miserable under Batista and American imperialism. In 1953, the average Cuban family made six dollars a week and 15-20% of the labor force was unemployed. The average salary of a rural Cuban was $91. Sugar companies also owned 75%  of the arable land and only employed 25,000 people full time and 500,000 people as part time workers during the harvest season which only lasted for about two to four months, for the rest of the year these people were relegated to poverty and unemployment. Only 2% of people in Cuba had running water and 9% of people had electricity. The vast majority of people in the rural areas lived in huts. The life expectancy was 59 years and infant mortality was 60 out of 1000 live births.

The notions that Cuba prior to Castro was a ritzy tropical paradise couldn’t be further from the truth. The vast majority of the population lived in poverty and a system of racial segregation--as horrible as the one in the US if not worse--was institutionalized and barred Afro-Cubans from accessing any employment opportunities other than domestic or manual labor. The only people who truly benefited from Batista’s Cuba were white wealthy landowners, business elites, and the professional class. These were the people that fled immediately after the revolution, not common workers or campesinos. The Cuban revolution was a true revolution of independence. It freed Cuba from the neo-colonial clutches of the United States which subjected the Cuban economy to the whim of monopolistic expansion by American corporations. There is no political independence without economic independence. Castro’s land reform and nationalization of major industries allowed Cuba to buck the reins of US imperialism and chart its own path of development without the destructive interference of an imperialistic power.
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The US sees an independent Cuba as a threat to its grasp over the rest of Latin America and its own status as a global hegemonic power. Therefore, it can’t let Cuba’s socialist development succeed. Though the US has attempted various methods to sabotage the development through means of terrorism and assasination, the Embargo, otherwise known as the blockade has been the most enduring inhibitor to a prosperous and socialist Cuba. The blockade is incredibly thorough and applies not only to U.S. nationals and businesses based in the United States but also to businesses and nationals outside of the US as well.

​In the battle against COVID-19, Cuba has been a country of firsts. It is the only country in all Latin America to produce its own vaccines. 

Cuba has sent more than 5,000 doctors to help treat COVID patients in 57 brigades to 40 countries around the world since the pandemic began. No other country has come close. 

Now, in a major new development, babies and children two years old and up will be massively vaccinated starting in 10 days. Cuba is the first country in the world to vaccinate babies and children under 12. 

On Friday, Sept. 3, Cuba’s Center for State Control of Medicines, Equipment and Medical Devices (CECMED) announced emergency approval for the mass vaccination of two-year-olds and children up to age 11 using the Soberana 02 vaccine. Soberana was developed and is produced by the famous Finlay Vaccine Institute. Pediatric innoculations will begin September 15. Trials showed the vaccine to be safe and effective in that age range. Youths 12 to 18 years will receive Soberana starting September 5.

By November 15 all schoolchildren under 18 will return to their classrooms fully vaccinated, and pre-school children as well. For now students will start their fall lessons on Sept. 6 by television, as has been the practice since the pandemic began.

Dr. Olga Lidia Jacobo Casanueva, CECMED Director, told Cuban TV, “It is great news for the Cuban people, for the Cuban family which has waited to be able to vaccinate their children. It is a real achievement for Cuban science and represents an historic moment in our country.”

Since late June, Cuba has experienced a dramatic increase in positive COVID cases amid the ever-harsher U.S. economic blockade and the shutdown of tourism due to the pandemic. From roughly 1,100 average new cases in early June, the figure skyrocketed to an average of 9,504 new positive cases exactly one month ago. The last four days’ average ending Sept. 4 was 6,899.

Despite the many challenges of increased cases and material shortages, Cuba’s socialist government and health institutions are soldiering through with the national plan and its three most effective vaccine lines to cover the whole population.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced Aug. 31 — in a special meeting of scientists and health professionals — that by November, 92.6% of Cuba’s entire population will be fully vaccinated with the three-shot process.

The bold project of universal infant, child and adult vaccination is possible because of the country’s highly organized vaccination system that has been in place for decades. Cuban scientists, fully supported by a government that places its trust in their expertise and dedication, work for the common good — free of a profit motive.

Plus, Cuban society has not suffered the polarization whipped up by right-wing politicians and false media in the United States that have actively opposed mask mandates and vaccinations. Millions in the United States have fallen victim to the anti-science hysteria, failing to vaccinate. The U.S. COVID cases and deaths are in the second-highest wave since April 2020 and rising.

The pandemic has been severe for Cuba due to the longstanding blockade further hardened under Trump. The tourism industry — a major source of income for the country and workers — has virtually shut down due to the virus.

Up to now, all vaccines worldwide have been approved for emergency use by corresponding health institutions, due to their highly effective results and the need to take immediate action given the severity of the pandemic.

The pediatric trials in Cuba began June 14 this year. The first stage was 25 adolescent volunteers, 12 to 18 years old, then a larger group of 350. In early July almost 600 babies and children under 12 took part in clinical trials. The children’s vaccine trial was named Ismaelillo, after poetry written by Cuba’s national hero José Martí to his son.

No children are exempt from the highly contagious delta variant, now dominant around the world. The urgency for pediatric vaccination everywhere is greater than ever as the school year begins anew this week.

The struggle against COVID is far from over. But Cuba’s latest achievement is a shining example of the Cuban people and their revolution facing adversity with determination to overcome.