COMMENTARY: By Jeremy Rose
In 2015, the John Key government announced a cooperation agreement that would see NZ Aid pay for Cuban doctors to be taught English in New Zealand before their deployment to the Pacific Islands as part of the communist island’s Medical Brigades.
Cuba, a country of just 11 million people that has been under continuous US economic sanctions since 1962, has sent more than 400,000 healthcare professionals to 155 countries over the last six and a half decades.
Since 1960, when an earthquake devastated Valdivia in Chile, Cuban doctors have been on the frontlines of medical emergencies around the globe.
They were there for the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, in Africa during the Ebola outbreak, in South Africa for the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and Italy during the outbreak of covid.
In any given year the country has had more health professionals working in aid programmes abroad than the USA, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the UK combined.
The National government and Cuba were unlikely bedfellows. The conservative party’s founding constitution in 1936 committed it to combating communism and socialism.
But the communist nation’s medical assistance programme has been a spectacular success when it comes to providing healthcare to those most in need, and the cooperation agreement was a concrete acknowledgement of that.
Soft power, hard currency
Cuba’s overseas doctors programme is both an exercise in what is sometimes called soft power and a source of desperately needed hard currency.
Economists are divided over whether the US dollar’s status as the global reserve currency is an “exorbitant privilege” but there’s no debate over the power it gives the US government to inflict economic devastation on its perceived enemies.
Last year, the medical journal The Lancet published an article that found that economic sanctions — the majority being unilateral imposed by the US — had caused more than 560,000 deaths every year between 2010 – 2021.
In total, the study attributes 38 million deaths – half of them children – to sanctions since 1970.
No country on earth has been under US sanctions for longer than Cuba. A 1958 arms embargo was expanded to include all goods four years later.
The laws and regulations governing the embargo have been described as the “oldest and most comprehensive US economic sanctions against any country in the world.”
Cuba not only survived those sanctions, but its commitment to investing in healthcare at home saw it achieve lower infant mortality rates over a sustained period than the US, while matching it for life expectancy.
Massively impressive
To describe that as impressive is to massively understate the achievement. Life expectancy and low infant mortality normally correlate very closely with a country’s relative wealth.
The US’s GDP per capita has been about eight times that of Cuba for decades.
During the Cold War, trade with the communist bloc helped insulate Cuba from the full impacts of the embargo. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the island nation facing catastrophic shortages of oil, food and basic goods.
A deal struck between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, in 2000, to swap Venezuelan oil for Cuban medical professionals was critical to the island nation surviving the crippling US sanctions regime.
That ended with the US’s imposition of a maritime blockade of Venezuela following its “arrest” — kidnapping is a more accurate term — of its president, Nicolas Maduro, in January of this year.
The longest running US sanctions regime in history has become a near total siege resulting in a devastating health crisis.
The UN reports that more than 100,000 patients are awaiting surgeries due to power outages.
“Shortages of electricity, fuel, medicine and medical supplies are severely disrupting emergency care, blood banks, laboratories, immunisation programmes and maternal and child health services.”
Blackouts lasting up to 20 hours have forced hospitals to suspend non-emergency operations. There’s no fuel for ambulances or private cars, so people struggle to get to health services even in an emergency.
Infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 deaths per 1000 live births. At least half of those deaths are directly attributable to US sanctions.
Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Cuba a “severe national security threat” due to its military ties to China and Russia. (The US has around 800 military bases in 80 different countries. Neither China nor Russia has a base in Cuba although both are said to have spy facilities — presumably not unlike the ones the US has in New Zealand and Australia.)
And in an effort to illustrate the “heinous nature” of the Cuban government, the US last week issued an arrest warrant for its former Defence Minister, 94-year-old Raul Castro, for the 1996 shooting down of two civilian planes off the coast of Cuba.
The planes were flown by the Brothers of the Rescue, a group that both rescued Cubans attempting to flee the island and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana.
The then President, Fidel Castro, declared the planes a threat to Cuba’s national security.
Many would take issue with that claim, but it is surely as credible as the US claim that the 57 boats it has sunk in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean since September last year, killing 194 people, were a threat to US national security.
The US accuses Cuba of human rights abuses, including those of medical brigade doctors who it says are victims of human trafficking and forced labour.
This would make Cuban doctors, surely, the only victims of forced labour anywhere to be given a free tertiary education before being trafficked to jobs paying significantly more than if they stayed at home.
(The American Civil Liberties Union has estimated that around 800,000 prisoners in the US produce more than $11 billion in goods while being paid just pennies an hour.)
None of the US’s explanations/accusations can be taken seriously. So, what else could be driving the ramping up of its decades old campaign to topple the Cuban government?
Noam Chomsky called it “the threat of the good example.” A poor country showing it’s possible to redistribute resources and defy Western dominance is simply unacceptable and must be crushed.
One showing that, for a fraction of the cost of what most Western countries spend on “defence,” it can be a superpower in the supply of medical assistance to the Global South is it seems doubly unacceptable.
And then there’s the threat to the bottom-line of US corporations.
ExxonMobil is currently before the courts seeking $1 billion in compensation for the nationalisation of its refineries in 1959.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of a US company — Havana Docks Corporation — that claims its waterfront property had been seized by the Cuban government in 1960. It will likely open the floodgates to similar claims.
In 1971, the government commission that first certified that the Havana Dock Corporation’s property had been unlawfully confiscated did the same for 6000 other companies with “legitimate” claims to property worth a combined $1.9 billion ($9.3 billion in today’s term).
Every year for the last three decades, New Zealand and Australia have joined a large majority of UN General Assembly member states in voting for a non-binding resolution demanding an end to the US blockade. (Last year’s vote was opposed by the US, Israel, Argentina, Paraguay, North Macedonia and Ukraine.)
But as that blockade is being tightened to the point of catastrophe, and with the US threating an armed invasion both governments have remained mute.
It’s shameful. Doubly so given that New Zealand’s last National government acknowledged Cuba’s contribution to the alleviation of suffering caused by poverty and scarcity with its cooperation agreement.
The people of Cuba are now suffering unprecedented poverty brought on by scarcity due to an entirely man-made disaster. We know who the culprits are, but not only do our governments remain silent, they continue to be slavishly committed to military cooperation and integration with one of the world’s leading enablers and purveyors of violence.
- Our governments may be silent but civil society isn’t. Here’s a link to an international petition and a NZ one. To keep up with what’s happening in Cuba and solidarity actions in Aotearoa follow the New Zealand Cuba Friendship Society on Facebook.
Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based freelance journalist. You can follow him on his Substack Towards Democracy.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.