Cuba, the blockade and the vaccine shortage | The sanc …

From Washington to Turin it is 6,700 kilometers away. As well as the different perception of what Cuba represents in the two cities. In the American capital, the exchange of Joe Biden for Donald Trump has not changed the hostile policy towards the island. In the industrialized north of Italy, a few scenes mean the opposite. On July 21, 2020, the Mole Antonelliana – Turin’s most famous building – was illuminated with two words symbolizing recognition: “Grazie Cuba”. The mission of the Henry Reeve Brigades ended at the worst time of the pandemic. Today, that gratitude has turned into mobilizations against the American blockade which has already passed 60 years. There were some in Milan, Trieste, Udine, Ancona, Lodi and Cremona, among other cities. But at the White House, they continue to auscultate the heart of another city, Miami, where they celebrated the death of Fidel Castro on November 25, 2016. The Cuban diaspora also salutes the continuity of a measure that prevents Havana from obtaining basic supplies to manufacture more vaccines. Those which would be necessary to advance more quickly in the vaccination of its 11.33 million inhabitants.

Last Friday, the Deputy Director of the Finlay Vaccine Institute (IFV), Yuri Valdés Balbi, said during a parliamentary session held at the Capitol in downtown Havana: “It must be said that we did not vaccinate more Cubans because we did not have the resources to make more vaccines, so that the world is clear “. The scientist denounced that the vaccination campaign of the population had not progressed as desired “because we did not have the resources, because these resources were blocked”. With a nice irony, he slipped that if the Biden government “did not have time to review the whole policy with Cuba, the one that concerns all Cubans admitted (in hospitals because of Covid)”, it should be reviewed. .

Something as basic as syringes for administering vaccines, on the island it is rare for others. An international campaign articulated in several countries under the slogan The blockade kills, your solidarity kills the blockade, has already organized aid to obtain syringes, as they are called in Cuba. Even in defying this non-perishable and anachronistic barrier, they echoed this cause in the United States. Saving Lives Campaign, Global Health Partners and US Women and Cuba Collaboration organizations – according to newspaper The day from Mexico – they plan to raise funds to send more than three million injections.

The government of Miguel Díaz Canel needs around 20 million syringes to complete the vaccination of its population. Besides the United States, solidarity groups with Cuba have sprung up in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Honduras, Spain, Italy and Nicaragua – among other nations – to address this challenge. Lor paradoxical is that the socialist country has so far developed five different vaccines and cannot get this basic supply to apply them because Biden maintains the economic seat under the same conditions proclaimed by Trump. These are Soberana 01, 02 and Plus, produced by IFV and also called Abdala and Mambisa, designed at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology.

The United States Democratic government maintains the same amount of sanctions that the Republican tycoon applied during his tenure (1917-2020). In ecstasy over the blockade, Trump imposed around 250 punitive measures against Havana. Despite all this, Cuba plans to vaccinate 70% of its inhabitants by August, towards the end of the summer in the northern hemisphere.

Statistics from the pandemic on the island according to the map from Johns Hopkins University in the United States indicate that at the end of May there were 140,087 people infected and 943 dead. On Friday 28, the country reported 1,188 new cases of Covid-19, 10 deaths and 1,449 medical leave. The usual informant on the evolution of the pandemic in Cuba is the national director of epidemiology of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), Francisco Durán García. The government is counting on the number of foreign nationals who have returned to their home countries (54) after suffering from the disease.

To the problematic conditions imposed by Washington with the blockade, so old that Cuba is punished by a law of 1917 – trade with the enemy (TWEA) -, Havana responds as every year since 1992 with its project before the United Nations to reject the unilateral measure of its powerful neighbor. On June 23, he will present it again with a predictable result in the vote. A categorical defeat for the United States and its unconditional ally Israel, which always accompanies them and does not maintain diplomatic relations with the island. Cuban victories at the UN are now also suffered by the far-right Brazilian government. Ever since Jair Bolsonaro arrived at Planalto, he’s been Trump’s rascal. Perhaps it is from Biden now and will continue with his political partner Benjamin Netanyahu.

While the blockade remains unchanged, the Democratic government of the United States repeats on tracing paper the historic interference in Cuba’s internal affairs. Island television last week denounced a meeting between the State Department’s second lines with Washington-funded figures in the Caribbean nation. To these political conspiracies on its own territory, Havana responded during the pandemic with its medical brigades which were nominated more than once for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since the virus spread from Wuhan, China, to the rest of the world, Cuba has affected 1,238 healthcare workers in 21 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and even Europe. . Its doctors played a key role in the deadly advance of the plague in Italy.

At 167 meters high – those of the Mole Antonelliana – and in the aristocratic as the industrial capital of Piedmont, the Italians lit this sign that said Grazie Cuba. This nation stuck in peacetime continues to show solidarity in difficult times.