A delegation of youth from the United States observed Cuba’s November 2022 municipal elections and offer an inside look into a true people’s democracy, where workers decide who will govern them, not wealthy oligarchs and corporations.

Cubans voting in municipal elections in La Habana on November 27, 2022

Cuba held elections for its organs of local government, the Municipal Assemblies of People’s Power, on November 27. A delegation of youth from the United States observed the vote first-hand as part of the US-Cuba Youth Friendship Meeting.
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Coming from the fundamentally undemocratic US Empire, it was the first time that many participants saw a functional electoral system in which the masses actually participate, and in which the majority truly rules.

Voter rolls and biographies of the nominees are posted outside of the polling station at the La Corbata cultural-technological center in La Habana, Cuba.

We observed voting in La Corbata, a neighborhood in La Habana currently undergoing transformation.
The polling site was inside a newly constructed cultural-technological center, which also houses arts programs, classes, a computer lab, school graduations, and community events.

At first arrival, we were surprised by how efficiently the voting process moved. There were not long lines at the La Corbata polling site, while in the US it is typical for voters – especially in poorer neighborhoods – to wait in lines for hours to cast their ballot.

A local election official explained that all citizens and permanent residents of Cuba are automatically registered to vote at age 16. At 18, they are eligible to be nominated to run as a delegate.

The nomination process happens in the weeks leading up to the election. ​​Between October 21 and November 18, more than 6 million voters – 73% of those eligible – attended the neighborhood assemblies for the nomination of candidates.

Nominees are chosen by local community groups, including the Committees in Defense of the Revolution, the country’s largest mass organization, with more than 8.4 million members out of a population of 11 million; the Cuban Federation of Women, whose membership includes more than 85% of all eligible Cuban women over 14 years of age; and the Communist Party of Cuba.
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The Communist Party of Cuba is not an electoral party; it does not “hand-pick” candidates; and party membership is not a requirement to run for office at all.

Before the election, the National Electoral Council goes house to house to verify voters’ information. This year, after Hurricane Ian devastated the Pinar del Río province in the west, election officials surveyed people still evacuated or sheltering there to ensure they would have voting access.

Cuban elections are always held on Sundays, so that voters are not restricted by their workdays to participate in democracy.

On November 27, polls opened at 7:00 a.m. and were scheduled to close at 6:00 p.m. The National Electoral Council used the power granted by the Cuban Constitution to extend the polling hours throughout the country for one more hour so that a greater number of citizens could exercise their right to vote.

In the US, elections that are scheduled on Tuesdays during work hours – combined with the inaccessibility of polling sites, strict ID requirements, racist voter intimidation, and a general lack of civic education – impede most of the working class from participating.

The US pushes the falsehood that Cuban elections are “not competitive.” In reality, every Cuban municipality must have at least two to eight candidates running, in order to ensure that voters have a choice. In La Corbata, three candidates were running, all of whom were women.
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Competitiveness in US elections has continued to plummet as corporations expand their monopoly over our ostensible democracy, or rather, oligarchy. In the November 2022 midterms, less than 8% of US Congressional districts were considered competitive.

An example of a Cuban ballot in the La Corbata polling station.

When Cuban voters enter the polling station, they confirm their voter information, receive a ballot with straightforward instructions, and fill it out in a booth. Then, they place their ballot in a box guarded by local elementary school students.
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Youth have always worked at the forefront of the Cuban Revolution, so it is a very honorable role for them.

Local elementary schoolers guard the ballot box in La Corbata

Any citizen can assist in the public vote-counting process. Official results are reported the same day – unlike in the US, where it takes weeks or even months to tally votes, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, with access to much more advanced technology than blockaded Cuba.
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If no candidate receives over 50% of the vote, the election moves to a runoff the following Sunday. This will be the case in 925 of Cuba’s municipalities after the November 27 elections.
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Moreover, the community can recall their representatives at any point once their terms begin.

Biographies of candidates are posted outside of the polling station for voters to read

Another key difference between US and Cuban elections is that in Cuba, there is no “traditional” campaigning. The community-nominated candidates cannot spend any money on campaigning, but they are still accessible to voters to discuss any issues.

Candidate biographies, highlighting their experience serving the community and their membership in different organizations, are posted outside of the polling place.

Voters make an informed decision based on the candidates’ genuine qualifications, not on flashy campaign mailers or attack ads made by Super PACs.

As a result, the energy at the polls was completely different than what is typical in the US, where crowds of campaign volunteers or paid workers gather outside holding signs, passing out literature, and urging voters to support their candidates.
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Political violence often escalates outside of polling sites in the US. During the 2022 midterm elections, there were even armed militias intimidating voters at ballot drop boxes in some states.

Elections officials inside the La Corbata polling station.

In the US, and all capitalist “democracies,” elections are determined by the amount of money invested in a campaign, which buys advertisements, mailers, staff, and other resources to reach likely voters.

A record-breaking $9.3 billion was spent on federal elections during the 2022 US midterms.

Political campaigns in the US more closely resemble reality TV shows – sensational, polarizing, and completely divorced from the material issues at hand.

North Americans’ shallow conception of democracy contributes to their confusion about the Cuban system. Some believe ridiculous anti-communist propaganda claiming that Cuba is staging its elections or paying actors to tell us lies.

As I wrote in Multipolarista in May, it is easier for many North Americans to believe that Cuba is lying about their democratic achievements – free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and employment, constitutionally enshrined anti-racism and gender equality – than to come to terms with the fact that our own government is choosing to deny us those same rights.

The far more advanced character of Cuban socialist democracy is exactly why the US is so intent on obfuscating and blockading Cuba’s reality. Their example shows us what is possible.
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For more than 60 years, a small island of 11 million people has resisted the biggest, most violent empire in history. If a true workers’ democracy can be realized 90 miles from our shores, it can be realized here too, and in every corner of the world.

This article was republished from Multipolarista.

For the 30th consecutive United Nations vote, the US again lost. A landslide margin of 185 to 2 condemned its blockade of Cuba on November 3. Only the apartheid state of Israel voted with the US, while Brazil and Ukraine abstained.

Since 1960, the bipartisan policy of the US has been to overthrow the Cuban Revolution by fomenting “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” According to the US State Department, punitive economic measures are imposed to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”

The US blockade daily costs Cuba $15 million; $6.3 billion since Biden took office. Cuba’s income for the first quarter of 2022 exceeded $493 million, but imports of goods amounted to more than $2 billion. A report from Cuba admonishes: “It is a dilemma for Cubans to make ends meet. Wages are not enough to face the very high prices that the lack of offers, real inflation, and speculation bequeath to us.”

Most recently on September 26, Hurricane Ian battered Cuba temporarily shorting electricity island-wide. In August, a lightening fire incinerated 40% of the island’s fuel reserves, exacerbating an existing energy crisis. Covid had already impacted domestic commerce and international tourism. For Cuba these were natural disasters; for the imperial hegemon these were opportunities as Biden continued Trump’s maximum pressure regime-change campaign.
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Given advances in technology, Joe Biden’s ability to tighten the screws makes sanctions much more effective and lethal than they were when John Kennedy first imposed an “embargo on all trade with Cuba” over sixty years ago. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez commented that the current US administration “has escalated the siege around our country, taking it to an even crueler and more inhumane dimension, with the purpose of deliberately inflicting the biggest possible damage on Cuban families.”

Onetime trenchant critic of US imperialism, the social-democratic NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) has been “reporting on the Americas since 1967.” Though in recent years, it has increasingly degenerated into cheerleading for US-instigated regime change in Nicaragua and other countries striving to socialism.

NACLA commented on the US blockade just before the UN vote in an article by academic Louis A. Pérez. He made 22 references to “sanctions,” but never once acknowledged that these unilateral coercive measures were illegal or, because secondary measures target third parties, that they constituted a “blockade.”

Along with NACLA, author Pérez is a longtime and sincere critic of the US blockade. His article has good information, recognizing that US humanitarian aid is intended to “relieve the very conditions to which sanctions have been dedicated to creating.” But with morally bankrupt ivory-tower equanimity, he criticizes both US imperialism and the Cuban Revolution for not achieving some liberal democratic ideal.

Pérez comments: “To recognize the baneful consequences of US sanctions is not to disregard or otherwise dismiss the failures of the Cuban government [emphasis added].” He continues: “But much of what is not well in Cuba can also be attributed to official policies and practices…with ill-conceived economic policies that fail to remedy want and need.” That is, the victim bears responsibility for the economic effects of the blockade.

According to Pérez, the fundamental failure of US policy is that the Cuban people are so consumed with the daily struggle for survival that they don’t have the time (that the more enlightened souls in academia have) to address “political freedom.” He quotes the angst of a Cuban colleague: “First necessities, later democracy.”  For such elevated minds, the tragedy of US imperialist domination is that the higher pursuits for democracy are sacrificed on the altar of banal survival.
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This recalls the counsel of the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral: “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children.”

Pérez repeatedly laments the “tragically ironic” US blockade; irony being a favorite word of the intelligentsia. He explains, the “irony” of the current record surge of Cuban migration is “not lost on informed observers,” such as himself: “Those sectors of the population most likely to constitute themselves as a political opposition [emphasis added] are often the very people most inclined to emigrate.”

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel provides context: “…we are the only country in the world for which a law was written, called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which guarantees the automatic entry into the US anyone who declares himself politically persecuted; this psychologically conditions an attitude of denial of the real causes for emigration, fundamentally economic and conditioned by the iron blockade of the same country that forces the emigrant to declare himself persecuted.”
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Pérez continues: “Ironic too…US policy serves to add to the woes of a people for whom emigration to the US offers the most immediate remedy to hardship.” However, the US policy of encouraging illegal immigration and preventing legal is not just ironic, it is deadly.

For Pérez, the “most egregious failure of sanctions” is that they “encumber…legitimate political change” to some imagined liberal Shangri-La.

So, what state in this hemisphere meets his lofty liberal litmus test? Could it be that “exceptional” land of the free where he resides? There’s no free lunch in the land of free where nearly one in four households experience food insecurity. Unlike Cuba, besieged by the blockade creating genuine shortages, the US has obscene wastage of massive food surpluses; an estimated 30-40 percent of the entire US food supply.

Nor is there free higher education or medical care in the land of the free, which experienced an estimated 500,000 excess deaths during Biden’s first year in office. Despite the blockade, Cuba has not only provided these social benefits gratis, but has sent 42 medical brigades to 35 countries since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile The Wall Street Journal carps: “Most poor countries put all hands on deck in this crisis. Havana exports its doctors.” The Cuban view of internationalism is that “we share what we have and not just what we have leftover.”

Nor are politicians free in the land of the free, where every candidate comes with a price tag and running for office necessitates vast sums of money. Here, buying political influence is constitutionally protected as free speech and corporations are legally considered “people.” In contrast, Cuba stands out for its experiments to eliminate access to wealth as the determining success factor in running for political office.
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With its board chaired by the program director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, NACLA has a different ideological bias on what constitutes political democracy than Cuba, where housing, health care, and education are constitutionally considered human rights.

After over six decades of imperialist siege against Cuba, only the elderly know life without sanctions. The agonizing material deprivation caused by the blockade, the endless shortages, the interminable standing in line for basic necessities of life, all have a corrosive effect on the moral fiber of the Cuban people subverting the spirit of socialist solidarity.

Leftists worry about cascading effects to the entire region of the precarious situation in Cuba.

Cuba solidarity activist W. T. Whitney warns: “Thanks to the US blockade, Cuba’s economic situation is more desperate than ever.” TeleSUR reports, “The Cuban economy continues to be gripped by rising tensions amid the tightened US embargo.”

Political unrest is undeniably mounting as conditions deteriorate. For the first time, Cuba is facing social media penetration from the US, which has managed to mobilize certain sectors of the Cuban population against the revolution.

As the US Peace Council cautioned: “No matter how heroic a people may be, socialism must provide for their material needs. The US blockade of Cuba is designed precisely to thwart that and to discredit socialism in Cuba and anywhere else where oppressed people try to better their lot…. Cuba is being attacked precisely because that small island nation promises a humane alternative to the decaying neoliberal order of present-day capitalism and its pending crisis of legitimacy. If a critical spotlight is needed, it is not on how the Cubans with so little should have done better, but on how the imperialists with so much must be defeated.”
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That Cuba has successfully not only persisted but has been an international model for the accomplishments of socialism does not mean that it will always be so. Cuba is a small resource poor island, defending socialism against a very powerful foe. The Cubans can resist, but socialist internationalist solidarity must support Cuba and compel the US to end the siege. This is not a time for complacency.

​-Roger D. Harris is with the human rights group Task Force on the Americas, founded in 1985.​

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.