Last November, unaware that a novel coronavirus pandemic was a few months away, the Des Moines Register published an article to mark the upcoming World AIDS Day (December 1).
Since mainstream media are only allowed to praise achievements of communist systems 30, 40, 50 years after the fact, if at all, the lead to the 2019 article read "On Global AIDS Day, researchers argue Cuba quarantine three decades ago controlled spread of HIV."
Cuba's quarantine of HIV+ people into sanitaria in the early 1980's was criticized at the time by some in the West in predictable bad faith as further proof that Cuba's Revolution denied its citizens basic human rights and was bent on becoming an island gulag, by not laying out all the facts. Not only did this bad-faith criticism lack basic reporting but it also ignored over time the positive results of Cuba's response to what became a global AIDS pandemic, results that seem appreciated by everyone else in the world except the United States, as the Des Moines Register acknowledges many years afterward.
No US newspaper, not even the Des Moines Register, would have published such praise for anything from the achievements of the Communist Party of Cuba, not even in the 1990's after the destruction of the socialist camp, let alone in the midst of a 2020 COVID-19 pandemic where the health of the economy is put over the health of the community.
CONTEXTS TO CUBA'S RESPONSE
My first trip to Cuba was in 1992. This was just a few months after the destruction of the USSR and several years into its quarantine policy, which US media had warned were like concentration camps. I arranged with some Cuban government officials to visit the Santiago de Las Vegas AIDS Sanatorium outside Havana. The morning of the visit, it was suddenly canceled. So instead of first-hand knowledge of what was going on in the sanitaria, I was left to get impressions of the policy from people I met, including gay men.
In that month-long visit I did get first-hand knowledge of what a poor country, having just lost its main partners in the Eastern bloc, and blockaded by the US, was doing to preserve its attention to social welfare and to preserve the gains of the Revolution. These first-hand impressions continue to radically inform me. As to the quarantine, all of the Cubans I met knew of the policy. Some knew people in sanitaria. But between the fears of the virus in those days and the Revolution's commitment to free health care, these Cubans seemed to view the quarantine as an extended hospital stay, not the gulag or concentration camp I had been warned about by Cuba's Yankee neighbor to the north.
Recall in very early 1980's, neither Cuba nor the rest of the world understood the pathology of the AIDS virus. According to a UC researcher, it was Fidel who had heard early reports of this mysterious infection from his troops in Southern Africa, where some were being treated. During a 1983 visit with the president of Kenya to Cuba’s Institute of Tropical Medicine, Fidel asked the doctors what they had learned about it. The doctors dismissed it, but Fidel assured them "You are wrong. AIDS is going to be the disease of the century, with many populations ravaged. It’s your responsibility to see that this does not happen in Cuba."
Hysterics were so great often doctors and nurses in US hospitals refused to go near the infected patients. Recall also that Cubans having been dealt blows of biological warfare from the US seriously considered this was another such US attack (the United States allegedly spread a dengue epidemic on the island and had sprayed an herbicide on its crops, among other acts of sabotage against Cuba's Revolution).
Further, the early appearance of the infection in Cuban soldiers in Africa fueled rumors the virus had been created by apartheid South African scientists as part of its wars in Southern Africa.
THE REVOLUTION'S PROMISE
Thirty years late, to Des Moines Register standards, and just in time for the novel coronavirus, there are still lessons the government of the United States can learn from Cuba's AIDS as well as its COVID-19 policies.
First, a few facts about Cuba's response to the AIDS pandemic.
* Most of the early cases were not gay men or men who have sex with men but rather heterosexual Cuban veterans from the African liberation wars, like in Angola and Mozambique, who had seemingly been exposed in Africa.
* In quarantine in rural sanitaria, the infected were still provided their monthly state salaries and afforded full health care - health care which in those early days of the AIDS pandemic was admittedly dismal and more like hospice care for those seriously affected.
* As science learned more about how HIV works, Cuba loosened the restrictions on the quarantine, eventually allowing the patients to leave their sanitaria for the day to visit family or go to their jobs.
* The quarantine policy ended completely in 1997 and since then Cuba routinely tests the population, provides antiretroviral medications free to all HIV+ Cubans, and has implemented an HIV and sex health element in all its primary and secondary schooling.
* According to the World Health Organization (WHO), besides the 451 community-based polyclinics that serve as the backbone to the island's health service, the sanitaria were converted to Centers for Comprehensive Care for People with HIV/AIDS after 1997 and "mainly provide ambulatory HIV care and education on how to live with the virus. This education includes information on the importance of healthy diet, good personal hygiene and compliance with treatment."
* Consequent to its early response to HIV and its sex education, Cuba has the lowest rate of HIV infection in the Caribbean and in all of Latin America. According to the North American Congress on Latin America's (NACLA) report "Cuba’s HIV Sanatoriums: Prisons or Public Health Tool?", "by 1992, Puerto Rico had 8,000 AIDS cases, or 229 per 100,000 residents, while Cuba had just 95—or a rate of one per 100,000 residents."
Cuba's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite a vicious tightening of the US blockade by the Trump regime, is similarly stellar.
CUBA AND COVID-19
Again, according to the WHO, Cuba has had a total of 128 deaths from COVID-19 [as of October 24, 2020] out of a population of over 11 million. Belgium, a country of comparable size, has had over 10,000 deaths [see https://covid19.who.int/table]. The US has exceeded 220,000 deaths.
So what can we learn from Cuba's rapid response and implemented programs to the HIV/AIDS pandemic to apply to the present COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably the same we can learn from any of the countries governed by communist parties, including Cuba, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam.
Of those three, Cuba might be the cash-poorest and most maligned, and yet many of its social health indices outrank the global North, including with COVID-19.
In line with the island's earlier medical responses, The Center for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology (CIGB) has joined in the worldwide race for a COVD-19 vaccine. Cuba's is named "Soberana-01" (or, Sovereign-01) and is slated to be ready in 2021.
Since 2001, Cuba's pharmaceutical infrastructure has produced generic antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV. CIGB has already produced a lung cancer vaccine and earlier one for meningitis B. The US blockade against Cuba prohibits access to these treatments that the rest of the world benefits on the grounds the money goes to entities owned by the Cuban Communist Party.
Cuba did not respond to the coronavirus with more sanitaria as it did with the earlier AIDS pandemic, but despite its reliance on tourism, it did shut down the tourist industry, beginning with stopping flights to and from Italy, one of the island's main source of tourism from the European Union. This has undoubtedly increased challenges and deprivations, as it would any First-World country (a similar shutdown by New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has yielded positive results for human health but the treasury has taken a hit).
But given the WHO data, and reports from the Cuban government itself, these challenges and deprivations clearly have not come at the cost of the Revolution's commitments to the Cuban people's lives.
CUBA MODELS THE BEST BEHAVIOR
In light of these facts, Cuba's response to both the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics was measured, principled, and appropriate. It reprioritized resources to ensure the new patients got what care was available, their wages were paid in full, and they did not lose their housing, and it took measures to protect the wider public.
In neither pandemic crisis, Cuba did not do what the US governments under Reagan in the early 80's, or Trump in 2020 did - while Reagan could not speak the words of what was happening as the HIV pandemic grew, and while Trump was lying about it. Cuba mobilized.
The US has essentially told its workers, the unemployed, and the evicted: good luck, you're on your own.
Incidentally, as it continued to address the HIV pandemic, Cuba's protocols did not end with lowering HIV infection in adults, and it won't end with finding a vaccine for COVID-19. In 2016, the WHO reported that "Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis as public health problems."
As of 2020, Cuba is now only a handful of countries that has successfully stopped mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus. According to the World Health Organization, only Armenia, Belarus, and Thailand have followed Cuba's example since then.
While the United States continues to mismanage the containment of this virus and fails to address the escalating needs of its people, the answer is a clear yes that we have much to learn from Cuba's example and what a socialist government mindful of its people will behave.
What could a rich country like the US learn from Cuba's example, one with infinitely more resources? Much.
