Cuba Under Media Attack for Sending Doctors, Not Bombs, to Help Covid-19 Victims
APRIL 14, 2020
BELEN FERNADEZ
As coronavirus ravages the world, Cuba has exhibited disproportionate heroism, deploying medical personnel to at least 14 countries thus far to battle the pandemicincluding to Italy, which has been particularly devastated. The response is in keeping with Cubas 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 Cubas primary antagonist, the United States, a country with an established predilection for bombing rather than saving people.
Cubas 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 Cubas 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 sectorwhich certainly sounds less repressive than, I dont 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 capitalismas illustrated by reports that low-income communities of color in the States are being hardest hit by the coronavirus.
More:
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efhmc
(14,726 posts)marble falls
(57,093 posts)Seems like he's backed off all his promises to fight Trump.