Coronavirus: In Solidarity, Cuba is Unique

By Carlos Aznarez on March 17, 2020

Photo: Bill Hackwell

Cuba is unique for a thousand reasons but especially because its people and that Revolution with 61 years of decent existence have turned solidarity into a way of living. And that is precisely what it is proving these days in which the famous coronavirus has turned the world upside down and, in some cases, has made the worst of the human beings, cradled by capitalism, to come to light. For those who praise individualism and “everyone for themselves”, Cuba emerges as a bastion of collective solidarity in construction that not only takes care of its people but also has enough to come to the support of those who want to claim it.

The Cuba, of Fidel Castro and Vilma Espin, that of Che Guevara and Haydee Santamaria, that of Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz Canel, once again shows us the extent to which a revolutionary state is founded on a people that is always willing to give what it does not have in excess to help those who do not have or who are in difficult circumstances.

This has all been seen in detail when earthquakes and weather-related disasters (also the result of capitalist destruction of the ecosystem) generated in different countries. Without hesitation, Fidel decided to send doctors and rescue teams to alleviate the suffering of those affected. Mexico, Peru, Pakistan, and Haiti are some examples of that attitude.

What can be said about the Cuban attitude towards the Chernobyl catastrophe, not only sending aid but, at the height of their display of solidarity, receiving numerous victims of that disaster in order to cure them and restore them to a new life. Many of these people are still on the island for health and psychological treatments.

Then came the Ebola fever and the thousands of Africans affected that resulted in so many deaths. No western doctor wanted to join the mission of helping those people so punished, but the Cuban doctors were there again without hesitation. Risking their lives but generating bonds of love with each patient, until the disease was defeated.

Now its coronavirus time. Desperate for not being able to contain the new plague but also exposing a public health system that is extremely deficient and abandoned by the state, the great majority of countries that call themselves developed or first world countries must go to Cuba in search of doses of Interferon and obtain the necessary help to stop the advance of the massive contagion.

If anything was missing to show the values of the Cuban people and revolutionary government, there were the island’s doctors who helped their Chinese colleagues to alleviate the crisis. Or the recent example of receiving an English cruise ship with sick passengers off the Cuban coast, which was emphatically rejected by most countries, demonstrating the caliber of what lack of solidarity means anywhere in the world except in Cuba.

In times of coronavirus, reality shows two profiles. On the one hand, that of the capitalist, imperialist countries, guilty of the birth of this and other viruses, many of which were thrown at the time, in a clearly terrorist action on Cuba and China, generating immense mortality in the pig population. On the other hand, the humanitarian and unconditional attitude of a small Caribbean island that does not hesitate to show that at least there is another world possible. Generous, fraternal, devoid of individualism, an internationalist with a capital letter, a brother to those who suffer most, but who does not look away when others, including its fiercest enemies, ask for help.

While Trump, frightened that the evil he created will turn against him, tries to pressure German laboratories to sell a potential vaccine against the virus so he can own it “exclusively”, the people of Cuba do not hesitate to extend a hand to anyone who asks for theirs.

The question that must be asked in this scenario is whether each of the Western countries that today are turning to Cuba in search of a way out of the drama that their populations are experiencing, do not think that the time has come to disobey the orders of the United States and put an end once and for all to the criminal blockade that Trump and they themselves, as submissive accomplices, generate year after year against the Cuban people.

Hopefully, it will not be long before this happens and the whole world will thank Cuba for so much generosity and selfless love, born of an ethic that only a socialist revolution can generate.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation North America bureau