As coronavirus ravages the world, Cuba has exhibited disproportionate heroism, deploying medical personnel to at least 14 countries thus far to battle the pandemic—including to Italy, which has been particularly devastated. The response is in keeping with Cuba’s decades-long tradition of “doctors, not bombs,” which has seen the tiny island nation dispatch tens of thousands of medics across the globe to combat everything from Ebola to more mundane diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. The Cuban approach stands in marked contrast to the modus operandi of the global superpower and Cuba’s primary antagonist, the United States, a country with an established predilection for bombing rather than saving people.
Cuba’s coronavirus performance is a welcome bit of uplifting news in an otherwise mostly dismal international panorama. Lest anyone start feeling too inspired by the idea of humanity, however, sectors of the US corporate media are dutifully standing by to burst the bubble.
A March Bloomberg opinion article (3/23/20) headlined “Coronavirus Could Give Cuba’s Flying Doctors New Wings,” for example, came equipped with the following caveat in the subheadline: “But allowing Havana to exploit the virus for hard currency will just empower repression at home.” The text of the article, by Mac Margolis, contained few easily detectable illustrations of domestic “repression,” aside from allegedly insufficient Cuban government efforts on behalf of a “consumer economy” and “emerging private sector”—which certainly sounds less repressive than, I don’t know, the US police habit of fatally shooting black people.
Margolis also stressed that, in Cuba, Covid-19 is “anything but an equal opportunity affliction,” and that “compañeros with connections or access to dollars have a far better shot at securing medication and loading up on groceries during a lockdown.” Never mind that Cuban compañeros would have better access to basic necessities in general had the island not been at the mercy of a sadistic US embargo for the past 60 years, or that severe socioeconomic inequality is overall a defining hallmark of US capitalism—as illustrated by reports that low-income communities of color in the States are being hardest hit by the coronavirus.
The Bloomberg article is accompanied by a photograph of Cuban doctors wielding Cuban flags, with the caption: “Nice flags, but how about a bigger paycheck?” And while bigger paychecks are obviously less imperative in societies—like Cuba’s—where the essentials of survival are provided free of charge, a more pertinent question in the time of global pandemic might be how the US spends trillions of dollars on wars and still generates news reports like “Uninsured Americans Could Be Facing Nearly $75,000 in Medical Bills if Hospitalized for Coronavirus” (CNBC, 4/1/20). READ MORE AT FAIR.