On Valentine’s Day 2022 in Havana, Cuba, I received the Soberana Plus booster shot, one of the island nation’s five homegrown COVID-19 vaccines. The jab had been a long time coming.
For the past year, I had been fixated on the idea of being injected with a made-in-Cuba coronavirus vaccine. While obviously not offering protection against the imperial machinations of my homeland and Cuba’s chief antagonist, the United States, the Cuban serums were at least being developed in the interest of global public health rather than pharmaceutical profit or “vaccine apartheid”, as World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described it.
Having inadvertently taken up residence in Mexico at the start of the pandemic in 2020, I had initially determined to fly to Havana in April 2021 to await vaccine availability. This plan underwent seemingly infinite adjustments, as the pandemic-induced suspension of straightforward air trajectories between Mexico and Cuba – normally a two-hour trip – left me with flight options like Mexico City-Cancun-Vancouver-Heathrow-Frankfurt-Havana and Mexico City-Cancun-Panama City-Bogota-Madrid-Havana.
The search for flights was rendered all the more enjoyable thanks to interference by the US – which, in addition to subjecting Cuba to a debilitating 60-year-long embargo for the crime of refusing to submit to capitalist tyranny, has also ensured that travellers wishing to peruse flights to Cuba on the website of the Mexican airline Aeroméxico cannot do so without being bombarded with warnings about US restrictions on travel to the country. Required to certify that I qualified for one of the permissible motives for visiting Cuba as a US citizen, I selected “support for the Cuban people” – as if this has ever been a real concern for the global superpower that has since the 1960s literally schemed to starve the nation into submission. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.