Cuba si (yes), China si

Ernest Che Guevara, in Reminiscences, tells of dictator Batista’s troops almost totally decimating the original group of young revolutionaries as they landed on Cuba’s coast from Mexico.  America’s intelligence operatives had forewarned Batista. The straggling remnants crept into the Sierra Maestra, their own mountain range as a command-base and flow of the lava of their […]

Ernest Che Guevara, in Reminiscences, tells of dictator Batista’s troops almost totally decimating the original group of young revolutionaries as they landed on Cuba’s coast from Mexico.  America’s intelligence operatives had forewarned Batista. The straggling remnants crept into the Sierra Maestra, their own mountain range as a command-base and flow of the lava of their revolution across Cuba. Batista’s army collapsed in defeat.
Although Che Guevara was captured and murdered fighting to extend the revolution to Bolivia, Fidel Castro climbed Assassination Mountains repeatedly sprouted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Committees of the American Congress later exposed them.  Cuban troops jointly with troops of SWAPO and ANC fighters bashed racist South African troops surging across Angola to crush her ruling socialist liberation movement, the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Cuba’s revolution climbed the mountain of survival on many fronts.
Che Guevara proposed that American imperial power would be defeated by launching “many Vietnams” against her military machine. He fought briefly in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) and fell fighting in Bolivia. One new weapon the Cubans sent forth were thousands of medical doctors and nurses to African, Asian and South American countries. In relations with Venezuela, for example, Cuba received cheap oil imports while Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela air lifted patients from various Latin American countries for high quality specialised treatment in Cuba’s hospitals.
 In the early 1970s, Monthly Review Press published reports on novel pro-poor people health delivery services in China and Cuba.  Subsequently, I taught an academic course on linkages between politics and economics in Cuba, China, the United States of America and most post-colonial African countries. The Cuban embassy in Lagos supplied me with monthly copies of GRANMA newspaper to keep me abreast of health policy events in Cuba and her export of doctors and nurses as part of a Healthcare Diplomacy.
Courses on American healthcare delivery which I took at the University of Wisconsin Medical School introduced criticisms which would bloom into bitter vicious ideological and physical fights against “Obama Care” waged by interest groups making billions of dollars out of rampant corruption inside America’s decadent capitalist healthcare structure. My profiles of healthcare delivery systems of Cuba and China painted shockingly different and novel alternatives. When Professor Olukoye Ransome Kuti, as Nigeria’s minister of health, announced a plan to bring in Cuban doctors for taking care to rural communities, the Nigerian Medical Association rose up in a chorus of panic. Cuban doctors, they feared, would demand very low wages and spoil the market for importations of expensive medical equipment preferred by Nigerian doctors and multinational companies.  Thousands of those doctors later abandoned Nigeria to practise in wealthier American and European economies. There was no “Cuba Si” for them.
One lobby group against ending America’s economic embargo against Cuba is the American Medical Association.  The embargo forced Cubans to become extraordinarily creative and inventive to achieve self-reliance. Instead of dependence on imported pharmaceutical drugs, they progressively experimented on their rich tropical plants and harvested vaccines and medicinal products. American drug companies fear a flood of Americans travelling to Cuba for cheaper drugs often without dangerous side effects. Medical doctors feared losses on income from government subsidies for poor and elderly patients if they trooped off to Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida.
Several major medical schools, including Stanford, Chicago and Harvard, however, obtained wavers to send their students to Cuba’s universities for courses in community medicine, nursing and specialised surgical operations. It is notable, however, that Cuba and China have jointly built huge plants in China for manufacturing drugs and vaccines developed by Cuban scientists. In a mockery of American embargo, Cuba’s genius now sits inside a market of over one billion people; including also producing drugs which cure forms of cancer prevalent in China.
It is significant that on 25th July, 2014, President Xi Jinping of China signed 29 bilateral cooperation agreements with Cuba during his visit to Cuba. Among these are: biotechnology, collaboration in cyberspace, construction of “multi-purpose terminal at the Santiago de Cuba harbour”, agriculture, oil extraction and renewable energy.
Fidel Castro also fought intellectual warfare against World Bank and IMF dictations with intensively researched and brilliantly analysed policy documents. He showed that debts by African, Asian and South American countries increase by geometric rates and can never be repaid. It deepens slavery.  The only solution is collective refusal to repay. Weapons of critical ideas and exports of doctors and nurses to poor communities across Latin America brewed socialist politicians like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Lula da Silva in Brazil and Eva Morales in Bolivia who mushroomed across South America. Guevara’s communism with-a-human-face had seized America’s backlands and made them hospitable to China in 2014.
The confluence of Cuba and China carries socialist internationalism into the 21st Century as the triumph of combative determination by aroused peoples to build socio-economic justice.  In relations with Euro-America, their leaders must hear Africa’s warning about dangers in a python swallowing a porcupine. Their quills are still of genocides, ruthless exploitations of human labour and natural resources. Africa must domesticate the dignity in innovative self-reliance by Cuba and China.