A group of Cuban scientists, doctors and frontline healthcare workers wrote an open letter to President Joe Biden Aug. 10, published in Prensa Latina, appealing to him to drop his confrontational stance toward Cuba, drop the 60-year-old blockade and the 243 sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, and work with Cuba to defeat the COVID pandemic. The letter cuts through Biden’s ridiculous statements made right after the July 11 protests on the island, in which he called Cuba a failed state, attacked its COVID response as incompetent, offered U.S. vaccines to be administered in Cuba by an international organization, as if Cuba’s vaccination program were unreliable. The scientists responded to these insulting charges, documenting the impressive achievements of Cuba’s biomedical industry, vaccine production, the excellence of its community-based public health system, and its history of collaboration with the WHO, UNICEF, and other international organizations.
The letter notes that like the rest of Ibero-America, Cuba is struggling with a surge in cases due to the Delta variant, but what makes its situation doubly difficult is that it must operate under the burden of the “paralyzing” 60-year-old economic blockade plus 243 sanctions imposed by Trump. The letter concludes by emphasizing that everyone is threatened by COVID, and thus nations’ health systems “should be supported not undermined.” Given the alarming shortage of vaccines, which endangers particularly developing nations (many of which want to purchase Cuba’s COVID vaccines), “we would argue that Cuba’s contributions to vaccine equity should be applauded not attacked.”
